A foil mask that sticks to your face and that you can look through.

There are many questions, that interested me in building this.

I try to find out how I can train my imagination and visual thinking. One possible way might be to temporarily inhibit my vision, to force my brain to work harder on recognizing the things I see and to simplify the pictures I get as input.

An idea, that came up for me, when reading Daniel Kahneman's descriptions of experiments he had done in the Israeli army, that seem to show a positive correlation between myopia and intelligence and when reading Tempel Gandin's Observations of sensoric issues often going hand in hand with being a visual thinker.

I also wonder whether this might help people with allergies to protect their eyes against flying pollen.

And then there is the artistic aspect, an eeryness that I wanted to explore. To me this view of completely hiding the eyes looks very interesting, a bit like sun glasses, or sky googles, taken to an extreme. You literally mirror the other person, but it's very unsettling to look at some one with no indication of eyes. It looks very futuristic and cyberpunk, how the foil sticks to the skin and I hope it will be a very simple improvement for many costumes, to give them this little bit of extra strangeness.

Step 1: You Need

Paper

Scissors

Rescue/Space Blanket (some one made them From a pack of chips, see comments)

Pen

10 Minutes of time

Step 2: Marking the Positions of the Eyes on a Template

Holt a stripe of paper on your face and carefully mark the positions of your eyes. No need to bee super exact, just don't poke your eye out.

Step 3: Cutting the Template

Cut the approximate shape you want, make sure the template is big enough to cover the region around your eyes and small enough, so that it will not end in a part of your face, where you have hair. The foil will not stick to hairy parts of the head and it will not reliably stick to parts, that move and stretch a lot.

To get a symmetrical result, fold your template in the middle and cut away where there are no two layers.

Step 4: Cut Out the Eye Wear

Cut off a stripe of rescue foil and put the template on it. Mark the edge of the template on the foil and cut out the shape of your eye wear.

Step 5: Usage

Use fatty face cream, to make your face a bit sticky

Place the foil over your eyes.

Lift your eyebrows and smooth the foil against your forehead and the sides of your face.

Press the foil against your cheekbones and push the foil up a little, to create a bigger space between your eyes and the foil. Lower your eyebrows.

I find wearing this foil eye wear a very interesting experience, all my facial expressions result in the foil bending and rustling, my view is distorted, to different degrees, depending on how the foil is bend in front of me. looking in the mirror it's a strange feeling to see no indication of my eyes.

Now I just have to find how to best test the training effect, with out falling for wishful thinking.

Thanks for reading

Philipp