"I want cat eyes."
It is one of the most common requests in consultations. Cat look, rabbit look, innocent look: the names alone are enough to conjure a rough eye shape.
But would those eyes read the same applied to your face? We transferred three eye styles onto one person's face, one at a time.
Only the eyes changed
Each archetype's reference eyes were applied to the same original. All three images are aligned to the same face position and scale, so tapping between them lets you compare a difference that lives in the eyes alone.
The bottom-left corner of each image also carries the reference photo, so you can see at a glance which eyes served as the model.
Original
Original — Before.
Cat look — The outer corners lift and the eyes lengthen.
Innocent look — The outer corners come down and the face softens.
Rabbit look — Round, large eyes. Reads younger.
The only thing that changed is the eyes. Face shape, nose, mouth, skin and hair all stayed as in the original. Overlaying the images confirmed it: the changed pixels covered 0.6% of the frame, clustered entirely at eye height.
In motion, it gets clearer
A still photo alone may not show the difference in eye shape right away. So we applied the same expression video to all four images. The expression is identical and only the eyes differ, which makes it easy to see exactly where the impression splits.
Through blinks and shifting gazes, the differences between the archetypes held steady. The direction of each eye shape matched what the still photos showed.
Which eyes were borrowed, and how faithfully they transferred
For each archetype, we cropped the original eyes, the reference eyes, and the applied result to the same size and placed them side by side. The middle is the reference; the right is the actual result.
Cat look
The outer corners lifted and the eyes lengthened. The upward tilt from the reference carried over, but the thickness of the crease line was shaped by the original lids.
The face as a whole reads slightly sharper and more self-assured.
Innocent look
The eye shape softened and the outer corners came down. The overall impression moved toward gentle as well.
Rabbit look
Round, large eyes. Of the three results, this one leans youngest.
Only the eyes changed, yet the whole face looks different
The eyes are among the first places a gaze lands on a face, and they carry much of the information we use to read an impression. In this comparison too, only the eyes changed, yet the archetype read differently.
The reverse also holds: when an eye shape does not sit well with a face, the eyes are often where that mismatch is felt first.