Optical Illusion Turns Beautiful Celebs Ugly

How'd they do that?

Take a few seconds, keep your eyes on the cross at the center of this video, and behold: the beautiful as beastly. Watch as the faces of celebs like Angelina Jolie and George Clooney seem to contort and look drastically different.

The "Flashed Face Distortion Effect" via io9 tricks your brain into peripherally seeing beautiful celebs as they might appear in a funhouse mirror. Kevin Bacon does his best Frankenstein impersonation without any photo alteration. Kiera Knightley's cartoon-angular face stands out, and Meryl Streep's complexion turns, well, green.

How does it work?

io9 says: "When cycling through [closely aligned] faces on a computer screen, each face seems to become a caricature of itself and some faces appear highly deformed, even grotesque. The degree of distortion is greatest for faces that deviate from the others in the set on a particular dimension." For example, if a person has a large forehead, it looks waaayyyy large.