Sloth-Facing — Neil Patrick Harris with sloth-face effect applied to portrait

Sloth-Facing

2013photoshop memedead

Published September 28, 2026

Sloth-Facing is a Photoshop meme where celebrities and movie stills have their eyes and eyebrows dragged down to line up with the nose, turning famous faces into droopy portraits named after the Goonies character. Redditor traverhass coined the term in a May 2013 Imgur album, and within a week the format was picked up by Buzzfeed, Funny or Die and Maxim as the summer's short-lived viral edit trend.

photoshop memes face swap memes subreddit origin memes 2013 memes celebrity reaction memes

Overview

The edits work by taking a close-up screenshot or press photo, then vertically compressing the subject's eyes and brows so they sit level with the nose1. The result mimics Sloth from The Goonies as well as the low-set facial features of real three-toed sloths, which is where the name comes from3. Actors, athletes and cartoon characters all got the treatment during the initial run in the summer of 20136.

The tone reads as affectionate ugliness rather than outright mockery, since compressed features tend to look cute rather than grotesque. Obvious Winner described the finished portraits as "adorably weird sloths"6. Sloth-Facing sits inside a small family of facial-manipulation edits that included the earlier "Tumblr Face Game" collages, which stretched or shrank features into disproportionate scale2, and the /r/Quasimoderp posts that dropped the collage margins in favor of a single warped face10.

Origin & Background

Platform
Reddit / Tumblr (viral spread)
Creator
traverhass
Date
2013

On May 30, 2013, Redditor traverhass posted an Imgur album to /r/funny titled "Been doing this in photoshop a lot... I call it Sloth-Facing," containing seven digitally lowered movie stills with the actors' eyes and eyebrows aligned to their noses1. Within six days the thread pulled in more than 3,815 upvotes and 143 comments1.

The technique built on prior face-warping trends. In 2011 a Tumblr collage of Elijah Wood's disproportionately scaled features started circulating, and on December 24, 2011, Buzzfeed published a roundup of 26 similar photosets under the "Tumblr Face Game" tag2. In late October 2012 the subreddit /r/Quasimoderp launched, and an early post featuring a warped Clint Eastwood became one of the first known examples of the format without white margins10.

How It Spread

On the same day as the original Reddit post, blog Tastefully Offensive reposted the album as a Tumblr photoset, gathering more than 10,400 notes in six days4. Buzzfeed writer Ryan Broderick pushed it further with a piece titled "Have You Heard Of The Hot New Sloth-Facing Meme?"5, and Obvious Winner ran a companion post calling the edits "adorably weird sloths"6.

Coverage kept building through the first week of June 2013. Funny or Die published a slideshow joking that Sloth-Facing would "very slowly become your favorite meme"7, while Laughing Squid8 and the Chive9 both ran their own galleries of the edits. KYM's writeup tracked the format as it moved from Reddit and Tumblr into wider blog coverage3.

The wave lasted only a few weeks before dropping off active blog rotation, making Sloth-Facing a snapshot of the mid-2013 Photoshop-meme cycle rather than an ongoing template.

Timeline

2011-12-24

Buzzfeed publishes the "Tumblr Face Game" roundup of 26 disproportionate-feature celebrity collages, an early precursor to Sloth-Facing.

2012-10-28

The subreddit /r/Quasimoderp launches, and the Clint Eastwood post two days later becomes an early example of the marginless warped-face format.

2013-05-30

Redditor traverhass posts the Imgur album "Been doing this in photoshop a lot... I call it Sloth-Facing" to /r/funny, coining the name.

2013-05-30

Tastefully Offensive reblogs the images to Tumblr, and Buzzfeed and Obvious Winner both cover the edits the same day.

2013-06-05

The Chive publishes a 15-photo Sloth-Facing gallery, capping a week of blog coverage from Funny or Die, Laughing Squid, Maxim and Blame It On The Voices.

Frequently Asked Questions