In Slate, Maggie McCart talks about her condition: prosopometamorphopsia, also referrred to as “demon face syndrome”. A literal waking nightmare:

 The skin texture on a face can change, or their noses or eyes seem to be stretched and exaggerated in grotesque, plastic-y ways. Sometimes a person’s face and mouth are replaced by geometric shapes—triangles, hexagons, and so on. When that happens, I call it “going Picasso” because they remind me of his cubist paintings. I’ve had faces appear to be made of potato skin, or tree bark, like the talking apple trees in Wizard of Oz.

This Science News article has examples of how faces might appear to people with the condition, taken from a study published in the Lancet. Here’s a CNN article covering the same stuff. It’s terrifying.

This video shows how they made those images in the pieces above (starts at 1:25):

I came to this via metafilter, where commenter jamjam seems to have a similar affliction:

When I looked at the Vogue magazine next to the cash register, the model’s features were swimming around on her face like big bugs on a mud puddle.

When I looked up at the woman behind the register, her face was far worse: the swimming bug features were still there, but in addition there was an underlying seething, bubbling process that reminded me of mudpots sometimes found in areas with hotsprings.

It was terrifying, and I was pretty sure I’d just had a stroke.

Read the piece, it’s incredible that McCart gets through a day like that.

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