Reason 1: More Photos, More Chances
This one is specific to how Ollie scores results, and it's easy to overlook. Every celebrity in the index has between 2 and 12 verified photos. When you search, your face is compared with every one of those photos, and each celebrity's score is their single best photo.
Taking the best of several photos favours celebrities with more photos. Someone with 12 photos across different years, hairstyles and lighting has 12 chances to land close to you. Someone with 2 has only 2. Even if their faces are equally similar to yours, the one with more photos is a little more likely to have one that happens to be very close.
Ollie does this deliberately: it means you see the exact photo that matched you, and a celebrity who looked like you ten years ago can still come up. The side effect is a gentle tilt toward well-photographed people. See how the celebrity database was built.
Reason 2: Where Their Face Sits
Faces close to the average across all 512 numbers of the embedding are close to many people. In high-dimensional spaces, some of these become "hubs", the nearest neighbour of far more faces than expected. Those celebrities come up for a lot of searchers. Distinctive faces sit at the edges and come up rarely.
That effect has its own article: the most commonly matched celebrities.
Read more: The Most Commonly Matched Celebrities, and What It Says About Facial Geometry
Reason 3: Who You're Compared With
Two settings decide which celebrities are even in the running:
- Gender. By default, Ollie compares you with everyone. If you choose Male or Female, it only shows celebrities recorded with that gender on Wikidata. About three in five people in the index are men, so the pool differs in size.
- Category. Choosing Actors, Singers or Footballers narrows the pool further. A smaller pool means the same few close faces come up more often.
If you keep getting the same name, try switching the Compare with menu to see who's next closest in a different group.
Reason 4: Photos Taken the Same Way
Some photos look alike because of how they were taken, not just who's in them. When the Ollie team compared every celebrity with every other, tennis players turned up in an unusual number of close pairs. Tennis photos tend to share long lenses, bright outdoor light, a similar angle and a mid-effort expression. K-pop stars, often photographed with similar styling, lighting and makeup, also appeared often. See celebrities who look alike.
Your own photo can do the same thing. A dim indoor selfie may sit closer to celebrity photos taken in similar light. That's one more reason to use soft daylight: it compares like with like.
Read more: How Ollie's Celebrity Database Was Built
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What Doesn't Make a Celebrity Come Up More
| Factor | Does it affect how often they're matched? |
|---|---|
| How famous they are | No, beyond being in the index |
| How attractive they're considered | Not directly |
| How many photos they have (2 to 12) | Yes, slightly |
| How average their face is | Yes |
| Gender and category settings | Yes |
| How their photos were taken | Yes, somewhat |
| Whether they were in the model's training data | No. The index is separate from training |
The last row is worth explaining. The model learned what faces look like from a research dataset of about 5.8 million photos. The celebrities you're matched against are a separate set of freely licensed photos from Wikimedia Commons. The model doesn't "know" any of them.
Rare Match or Common Match: Which Is Better?
Neither is better, but they mean different things. A rarely matched, distinctive celebrity in your top five usually means you share a standout feature with them, and friends tend to see it straight away. A commonly matched celebrity may be a real resemblance or may be a hub you're close to simply because you're near the middle.
The best test is repetition: try two or three photos and see who stays. And look at all five matches together. The feature they share is what really defines your face. See what your celebrity match tells you.