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Girl with a Pearl Earring meme template

Johannes Vermeer · c. 1665

Girl with a Pearl Earring face swap

The over-the-shoulder look that has launched a thousand captions. Now with your face.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, as painted Girl with a Pearl Earring with a different face swapped into it
An example: another painting's face. Yours goes on the right.

or

Under 15 seconds · no sign-up · your selfie is never stored

How it works

  1. Take a photo

    Front camera, decent light, look straight ahead. Or pick one you already have.

  2. We paint you in

    Your face goes into the painting, keeping its light and its brushwork. About fifteen seconds.

  3. Share the link

    You get a page anyone can open. No account, nothing to install.

Where this one comes from

Johannes Vermeer painted this around 1665 in Delft. It is not a portrait of anyone in particular but a tronie, a study of a type and a costume, which is why the turban and the enormous pearl belong to no real place or person.

What is in the picture

There is no room behind her. Vermeer laid a flat dark glaze where a background would be, and age has taken it darker still, so there is nothing to read but the turn of the head, the blue and gold cloth, the parted lips and the pearl. The pearl itself is two strokes of white lead over grey, and it hangs there large enough that most scholars doubt it was ever a pearl at all.

When people use it

The pose does the work: someone half turned away, caught in the act of looking back. It fits the moment you hear your name from across a room, the moment you are asked a question you were not supposed to hear, and the double take at a price tag.

How your face lands in it

Pick this one if your hair is short, tied back, or currently a decision you regret: the turban covers the hairline completely and none of your own hair reaches the picture. The head is turned back over the shoulder and lit hard from the left, so a photo taken slightly off-centre sits better here than a straight-on selfie, which tends to flatten the cheekbone the whole pose depends on.

Girl with a Pearl Earring — Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665. The artist died in 1675, so the work is in the public domain worldwide, and a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain painting carries no new copyright. Source

Also in: Paintings · Baroque · Dutch Golden Age

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All 105 paintings →

Questions

Does it work with short hair?

Better than anything else here. The blue and yellow turban covers the hairline entirely, so whatever your hair is doing on the day never reaches the finished picture.

Is the pearl real?

Almost certainly not. It is far too large for a natural pearl of the period and there is no drilled hole anywhere on it, so the likeliest answer is polished glass or tin — painted by a man much more interested in the highlight than in the jewel.

Should I look at the camera?

Yes. She is looking straight out of the picture over her shoulder, and a photo where your eyes meet the lens lands closest to that. The turn of the head comes from the painting, not from you.

Is it free?

Yes. There is a limit on how many you can make in a day, and sharing one earns the allowance back.

Do you keep my photo?

No. Your selfie is used to make the image and then dropped — it is never written to disk. The finished meme is stored, because it has a link people can open, and it is deleted after 90 days.

Can I use someone else’s face?

Please do not. Use your own. Putting a real person into a picture they did not agree to is exactly the thing this is not for.

Can I post the result?

Yes, anywhere you like. The paintings are public domain; what you make with your own face is yours.