A field guide
Anyone can pull a face. A championship-grade ugly face takes technique, commitment and a total disregard for your future dignity. Here's how to build one zone by zone — and how the QUFC lab actually scores you, including the one mistake that quietly costs people points.
First, the philosophy
QUFC never tells anyone which face to make. The fun of an ugly face contest is watching what people invent when nobody gives them instructions. So this isn't a list of faces to copy — it's a set of tools. Use one, combine three, or ignore all of them and do something nobody has seen before. (That last option tends to win.)
One rule above all: it's about ridiculous faces, never real ones. An ugly face contest celebrates what people can do with their faces on purpose. It is never a judgment of anyone's everyday appearance.
The quick version
Zone by zone
The single most dramatic thing a face can do. Drop it as far as it goes, then push it forward or slide it to one side. In the QUFC lab a big jaw drop often comes back as Jaw Unhinged; push it forward too and you're into Jaw Dislocation Event territory.
Stretch it wide, curl the top lip up toward your nose, or let the bottom lip collapse and hang. Pulling the whole mouth sideways (Lateral Lip Drift) reads beautifully on camera. A tight pucker is a classic for a reason — the lab calls it Duck Face Malfunction.
Squint hard (Squint Overload), go wide and unblinking (the Thousand-Yard Stare), or cross them. Mixing the two — one eye squeezed, one eye wide — is where eyes go from silly to deeply concerning.
Brows sell the emotion. Shoot them up (Eyebrow Liftoff) for horror, crush them down (Brow Furrow Incident) for rage, or — the advanced move — raise one and drop the other.
Scrunch the nose like you smelled something awful and let the cheeks bunch up underneath. Puffed cheeks work too. These small muscles are what turn a funny face into an actually ugly one.
The secret weapon most people forget. Tuck your chin back to summon extra chins, or tense your neck until the cords stand out. It's the difference between a face and a full-body commitment to the bit.
Inside the lab
The Face-Off uses face-tracking that runs entirely in your browser — your photo isn't uploaded to score it. It doesn't look at how attractive anyone is. Instead it measures how far your face moves away from your own relaxed face, across five areas: Mouth Mayhem, Eye Chaos, Brow Disaster, Cheek & Nose Incident and Chin Commitment. Then it checks whether you actually held the pose or just flickered through it.
The score is the distance from your relaxed baseline — the first photo the lab takes. If you're already smirking, squinting or bracing for the ugly face during that baseline, you've moved your own starting line and the lab measures less. Let your face go completely slack for those three seconds. Boring baseline, glorious score.
What the lab can't see is humor and originality, which is why real contests use human judges and the official rubric: Realism, Creativity, Humor and Pure Ugliness.
Training regimen
The world's best ugly faces come from gurning, the centuries-old English sport of pulling faces through a horse collar. The champions practice. You can too:
Study the masters
The original QUFC contestants didn't have a field guide — just instinct and a willingness to be photographed. Their entries in the Hall of Faces show almost every technique on this page, usually several at once. Notice how the winners use their chin and neck.
Visit the Hall of FacesQuestions
The one nobody saw coming. Technically, faces that move the most areas at once — jaw dropped, nose scrunched, brows uneven, chin tucked — score highest with the QUFC lab, but human judges reward surprise above everything.
Pulling faces is just exercising facial muscles. You may discover muscles you didn't know you had and feel them the next day. Don't force anything that hurts, and be gentle with your jaw.
Relax completely for the baseline, use more than one zone, and hold your face still through the end of the countdown. Then challenge someone to beat it.
Make your face, get a score out of 100, and send it to someone who thinks they can do worse.
Start a Face-Off Contest ideas for any crowd