The Google DeepDream Makeup Tutorial That Nobody Asked For

By Jennifer Culp | September 29, 2015 | 8:30pm

In Depth

You’re gonna have to do some prep work for this one: go print out a bunch of pictures of dogs, preferably on cardstock. If you don’t have any dogs of your own, feel free to go creep my Instagram and use mine. They are quite photogenic.

Cut out your dogs. Don’t stress too hard about perfection. If you do this right, everyone who sees you will feel way too disturbed to worry about your poor paper cutting skills! I left tabs at the bottom of the wet Lilly-dog heads so I could fold them over and tape the pictures to a headband.

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I got this Make Up For Ever flash palette dupe for $10 and some change on eBay. I literally Googled “makeup forever flash palette dupe,” clicked on the first Reddit link that popped up, clicked on the link embedded therein, and bought the thing. It took a month to arrive, and now it is here! I have given absolutely NO THOUGHT WHATSOEVER to any ethical consideration that might potentially pertain to this purchase, nor to the composition of this substance and any potential cancer-causing agents it may contain. I just feel like I should mention that.

Now crank up your music! It’s time to get weird.

You’ve DeepDreamed some of your selfies, right? Of course you have! If not, I…I don’t understand you. Were you not curious?? But there were those two weeks in July when everybody who did DeepDream their selfies changed their Facebook profile pictures to DeepDreamed pics, anyway, so you’ll still get what I’m talking about.

DeepDream recognizes eyes pretty well, but layers its reiterated eyeball impressions heavily so they look…I think the technical term is “fucked up.” In convolutional neural network vision, human eyes are very round, very wide, and tend to have a very unflattering yellow-green cast. So, there’re your instructions!

(If I were planning to wear this out somewhere, I would probably use ever-infallible wet eyeshadow rather than the flash palette so as not to smear my eyes off onto everything I encounter. BUT, I want to play with my flash palette, so adjust according to your needs. This series isn’t titled “Extremely Practical, Girl.”)

Now it’s time to add eyeballs! Am I merely going to paint them on with my newly acquired flash palette? NO, not when I have a perfectly good collection of glass eyes sitting around just waiting to be set into jewelry or glued to my face! (I bought them online from Van Dyke’s Taxidermy Supply years ago. It looks like prices have gone up a bit since, but they are definitely great glass eyes! Worth the money if you want a good fake fish eye, imo.)

You can attach almost anything to your face with eyelash glue, as long as it’s not too heavy. As usual, let the glue set for a moment before sticking the eyeballs onto your skin.

DeepDream envisions awful-looking wrinkles, orifices, and folds where human eyes see smooth expanses of skin. Add some! Paint on a few more extra eyeballs, too, for variety.

Lashes! I used three single lash strips from three different pairs and applied them asymmetrically to enhance the imbalanced eyeball illusion.

Don’t forget your neck! Speaking from the benefit of experience, I can warn you that it is kind of hard to see what you’re doing during this part. You really should figure out what you did with your prescription and order those contacts you keep saying you’re going to buy.

DeepDream I.D.s lips really well, provided you’re wearing lipstick in the image you upload for it to dream about. I chose to overdraw my lips unevenly to stay in keeping with the overall off-ness of this look. It might have looked slightly less horrifying if I’d used a matte lipstick, but, bygones.

Replace one of your ears with a dog’s face. (I used double-sided tape. It stayed on well! Do NOT get your hair caught between the tape and your skin if you can help it.)

Add more dog faces all over. Pareidolia parrrtaaaaay! Bonus points for color matching.

SUPER EXTRA CREDIT bonus points for adding an eyeball in one of your nostrils!! (Does DeepDream do this to everybody’s selfies, or just my selfies? Anyway, only stick an eye in one of your nostrils; you still want to be able to breathe.)

yessssssssssssss

You’ve done it!! You’re ready. You know what you have to do now.

Sleep well tonight, fellow organics. ♥

Jennifer Culp has (sort of) figured out Kinja now!!! You can also talk to her about lipstick, dogs, and good sources for glass eyes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and if you like games you should probably come join the gang at Gamervescent.