It’s kind of creepy to feel so many eyes staring at you. So many eyes, so many noses, so many mouths. We need a second here to decipher which features are actually hers and which were painted on. After careful examination, we think it’s the bottom ones.
This makeup artist, based in Vancouver, B.C., has an Instagram page full of these types of illusory looks like this. Her name is Mimi Choi, and She was inspired by another artist called Alex Garant. Having smaller versions of your face on your face! It’s almost all a little too real-looking. Is that really makeup?!
A Veil of Marble
Does this look like the work of one of our modern visual illusionists? Quite the opposite. This is a sculpture by Italian Rococo artist Antonio Corradini. He devoted years to this marble carving during the early 1740s without commission. The final work never even sold. What an incredible example of a finely-honed craft!
And to think that this was all carved out of marble by hand! Called The Vestal Virgin Tuccia, or Veiled Woman, it is now permanently housed in Rome at the Palazzo Barberini. His subject was an ancient Roman Vestal Virgin who was wrongly accused of lacking chastity.
The Hidden 8 of Diamonds
Here we see a great example of use in negative space. It's one of those things that might take a while to realize but once you see you can't unsee. If you stare at this one long enough, the numeral eight begins to reveal itself in a new way.
It must have been someone very bored with a card game who figured this one out. Look at the eight diamond shapes. Then focus on the negative white space between them. Suddenly, a large figure eight in the center of the card appears. It’s a clever bit of detail, isn’t it?
Jupiter’s Long-Lost Cousin
Do you see the resemblance? Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, and this perfect circle of wood looks exactly like it. Right? Anyone who has ever looked at space or galaxy-themed pictures knows that this is what different stars and planets can look like from a distance — ethereal, wavy patterns on a perfect sphere.
Just like this piece of wood, which has no business looking like something NASA would find interesting, and yet here we are. It looks like it is being used as a tabletop. One that would be criminal to cover with a map.
Disappearing Dots
There are 12 black dots on this grid. The crazy part is you cannot see them all at once. It’s neurologically impossible. Instead of seeing all 12, the dots seem to twinkle on and off. Scientists invented the Scintillating Grid Illusion in 1997. They say the grid tricks your brain into seeing a pattern that doesn’t exist.
The internet went bonkers when game developer Will Kerslake tweeted the Scintillating Grid in 2016. Part of the reason the illusion works is that humans do not have the best peripheral vision. When you focus on one dot, the others seem to disappear. This happens because your brain mistakenly fills in the rest of the pattern.