The Quick Version
- Take a clear, front-facing photo in soft light, ideally from about 1.5 metres with the rear camera.
- Open Ollie's celebrity lookalike finder and upload it.
- Choose who to compare with: everyone, or just actors, singers or footballers.
- Look at your top five, not just the first.
- Repeat with one or two more photos. The names that keep appearing are your real lookalikes.
It takes a few seconds per photo, it's free, and your photo is never stored. The rest of this guide explains each step and how to get the most out of it.
Step 1: Take the Right Photo
The photo matters more than anything else. Ollie's model measures the proportions in the picture, so anything that distorts them changes your results.
| Do | Avoid |
|---|---|
| Face the camera straight on | Three-quarter "good side" poses |
| Rear camera from about 1.5 m, zoom to fill the frame | Close-up selfies, which widen the nose by about 30% |
| Soft light from a window or open shade | Side lamps, overhead lights, light behind you |
| Relaxed face or small smile | Big grins and pulled faces |
| Glasses off, hair off your face | Sunglasses, low caps, bangs over your brows |
| The original photo | Filters, screenshots, social media downloads |
| Just you | Group shots, where the largest face is used |
More detail in the best photo for celebrity matching.
Read more: The Best Photo for Celebrity Matching: A Practical Guide
Step 2: Upload and Choose Your Settings
Under the upload box are two menus:
- Gender is set to Everyone by default, so you see who you look like across genders. Switch to Male or Female to only compare with celebrities recorded with that gender on Wikidata. Ollie never guesses your gender from your photo.
- Compare with narrows the list to Actors, Singers or Footballers. Want to know which actress you look like? Pick Actors.
Then upload. Ollie finds your face, straightens it, turns it into 512 numbers and compares them with every celebrity photo. Usually that takes a few seconds; if the matching server has been idle, the first search can take up to about 15 seconds to wake it.
Step 3: Read Your Results
You get five celebrities, each with a percentage and the photo of them that matched you best. Every celebrity has between 2 and 12 photos in Ollie's index, so the photo shown is the one closest to yours, which might be from years ago.
- The percentage is a rescaled similarity score. Higher is closer. It's for comparing your five matches, not a probability. See understanding your results.
- The order matters more than the numbers.
- The common thread is the most interesting part. Look at all five photos and ask what they share: brows, eye spacing, jaw, nose. That's what defines your face to the model.
Every celebrity photo comes from Wikimedia Commons under a free licence, and the photographer is credited under each result.
Read more: Understanding Your Ollie Results: What the Scores and Rankings Mean
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Step 4: Try More Than One Photo
Different photos of the same person can give different matches. Light, angle and expression all nudge the 512 numbers. Two or three good photos, taken on different days, give a much clearer picture.
Write down each top five and count which names appear more than once. A celebrity who shows up in all three is your most reliable lookalike, whatever their percentage. See why the same person can get different results.
Step 5: Share It (and Try Something New)
Results come with a share card for sending to friends, who are often the best judges of a resemblance, since they know your real, unflipped face.
If you're curious about your face beyond who you look like, the free face scan in Ollie Stylist measures your face shape and suggests haircuts that suit it, and the face symmetry test shows how evenly balanced your features are.
Is It Free, and Is It Private?
Yes and yes. Your first search each day is free without an account, and a free account comes with 3 credits. There are no ads.
Your photo is processed in memory and discarded when the search finishes. Ollie doesn't store it, doesn't keep your face fingerprint and doesn't use it for training. For each search, only an account ID or a hashed IP address, the IP and a timestamp are kept, to enforce the free limits, and those are deleted after 90 days. See the privacy policy.