The Phenomenon of ‘iPhone Face’ Explained

Viewers of Daisy Jones & The Six can’t get past Camila Morrone’s “iPhone Face.”

The first episodes of period drama Daisy Jones & The Six, which also stars Riley Keogh and Sam Claflin premiered on Amazon Prime Video.

The show charts the rise and fall of a fictional rock band in the 1970s. But Camilla Morrone’s “iPhone face” has become a talking point.

What is iPhone Face?

• “iPhone Face” is a term used to describe the face of a person who looks like they know what an iPhone is.

 

• It is often used by social media users to describe an actor in a period movie or TV show whose face is too distractingly “modern” to be believable. According to viewers, Morrone’s “iPhone Face” makes her performance unconvincing in Daisy Jones & The Six which is set in the 1970s.

 

• The concept of iPhone face was seemingly first coined by Twitter users to describe the casting of Timothée Chalamet and Lily-Rose Depp in the fifteenth-century Netflix drama The King (2019). Social media users also suggested Florence Pugh has an iPhone face in Little Women (2020).

 

• However, iPhone face became widely used as a pop culture term after Dakota Johnson’s performance in Netflix’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (2019). Social media users said Johnson’s undeniably modern “resting iPhone face” felt misplaced in a movie set in the 1800s.

 

The Big Picture

• “iPhone Face” could be considered as a byword for the phenomenon of “Instagram face.” According to a 2019 piece in the New Yorker, there has been a gradual emergence of a single cyborgian “Instagram face” among professionally beautiful women like Hollywood actresses. The availability of cosmetic surgery means facial features — like plump, high cheekbones, full lips, a small, neat nose, and catlike eyes — can become dominant beauty trends that women can adopt in radical ways.

 

• Social media users may be using “iPhone face” to denote a dominant facial look among Hollywood actors which can only usually be achieved by 21st-century cosmetic procedures and therefore look out-of-place in a historical drama.

 

But: “iPhone face” could also be about viewers typecasting actors in a previous role or knowing their celebrity persona outside of acting. Morrone is most famous for being Leonardo Dicaprio’s ex-girlfriend and Daisy Jones & The Six viewers might not be able to shake that.

Also: Social media users seem to agree that The Menu actress Anya Taylor-Joy has “the opposite of iPhone face”