Why we kept the face

Every version of Puritanizer before the current one changed the face. Some of them changed it slightly. Some of them changed it entirely. None of them were funny.

The moment we told the model "do not touch the head" — everything locked into place. The tool became itself. There is a specific, irreplaceable comedy in seeing your actual friend, their actual expression, their actual hair, their actual sunglasses, wearing a full Victorian mourning gown. A different face in the same outfit is not funny. A different outfit on a face-swap is not Puritanizer.

The technical reason

Preserving the face is cheap. The model already has a detector that can identify "head" as a region, and a well-written instruction is enough to prevent it from being re-painted. We did not need a segmentation mask, a two-pass pipeline, or a separate face-restoration step. The prompt does the work.

What we did need was an extremely direct instruction. "Do not change the face" does not work. "Preserve the subject's face, hair, and head exactly" does. The model listens to specifics. Left to its own interpretation of "face" it will sometimes include the neck, sometimes exclude the ears, and occasionally decide that the hair was always part of the outfit and replace it with a wimple.

The line we shipped names every part of the head explicitly and treats it as an exclusion zone. Everything else is editable. That is the entire rule.

The comedic reason

The humour of Puritanizer depends on the viewer recognising the subject. If the photo is of a stranger in a nun habit, it is a stock photo of a nun. If the photo is of your friend Kelly in a nun habit, it is a piece of art. The face carries the entire recognition payload. The outfit carries the joke. Separating the two cleanly is the whole product.

We think of it as the same reason a caricature works. A caricature is funny when it exaggerates a specific person. A generic cartoon face is not a caricature; it is a cartoon. Puritanizer exaggerates the wardrobe. The face has to be preserved for the exaggeration to land.

The practical reason

If the face changes, the tool becomes a face-swap tool. Face-swap tools have an entire category of ethical and legal concerns that novelty image editing does not. We are very comfortable painting a bustle dress onto a beach photo. We are not comfortable replacing someone's face with someone else's. Keeping the face exactly as it was is both a creative choice and a firm line.

The one exception

The deep-sea diving suit has a brass helmet. The helmet covers the face by design. If you pick the deep-sea diver and the face disappears inside a brass dome, that is the outfit doing its job, not the prompt failing. There are a handful of other outfits in the catalogue with similar side effects — astronaut, hazmat, motocross helmet, beekeeper veil. In those cases the face is inside the costume, not replaced. It is still the same face. You just can't see it.

Everything else: the face stays. Always.

See for yourself →