About

Face Bombing is a photoshop technique that involves sampling the face of an individual in a group photograph, which is then superimposed over the faces of everyone else shown in the same image. In contrast to face swapping, which strictly entails switching the faces of two individuals in a photograph, face bombing can be distinguished by its multiplication of one particular individual's face.

Origin

The earliest known facebombs coincided with the emergence of the Weegee photoshop meme on 4chan in 2007, in which the face of the Super Mario video game franchise character Luigi from the 1992 educational game Mario is Missing is superimposed on to various subjects within an image (shown below).

Spread

On December 1st, 2009, a facebomb-style photo was submitted to the single topic blog Nic Cage as Everyone^[1] on December 1st, 2009, in which the cast of Seinfeld is replaced with Nic Cage's face (shown below).

On July 13th, 2010, the Internet news blog Urlesque^[2] posted a compilation of notable facebomb photoshops.On September 13th, Redditor Jgunman submitted a post titled "First Post. Am I Doing This Right?" to the /r/pics^[5] subreddit, which included a four-pane image using a photograph of Miss Universe contestants ending in a facebomb panel (shown below). Prior to being archived, the post garnered more than 2,700 up votes and 440 comments.

On October 6th, the Facebomb Tumblr^[4] blog was launched, which highlights notable facebomb examples. On November 26th, 2011, 9GAG^[7] user danielma90 submitted a facebomb image of an Asian guy in a post titled ""Difficulty Level – Asian"”:https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/difficulty-level-asian (shown below, left). On January 20th, 2012, the Internet humor blog Smosh published a compilation of 20 facebomb photoshops. On July 19th, the FaceBomb mobile app was released, which allows users to clone a face over all subjects in a photo (shown below, right).

On Reddit, facebomb images are typically iterated in vertical multi-pane format, similar to that of Tenso, with the title “am I doing this right?”

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Facebomb didn't arrive on Google's radar until June of 2009, but this may be in reference to the Facebook context.

External References