FaceApp: suddenly, looking older was the idea.

You could look at an aged FaceApp selfie and begin checking for family resemblance. Was that your father’s face? An aunt’s expression? The app had added wrinkles and grey hair, but left enough of the original person for a comparison to feel worth making.

In July 2019, looking older was the point. You selected a photograph, applied the effect and had a possible future face ready to show somebody. Whether it looked flattering was hardly the first question. Did it look convincing?

For a photo effect, that was a useful way to get people to examine the result rather closely.

Familiar faces, several years later

FaceApp had been around since 2017. TIME’s July 2019 coverage (opens in a new tab) described the existing app’s renewed popularity through the age-filter challenge. This was a new burst of attention for a tool that already existed.

Indian celebrities provided recognisable examples. The Indian Express’s gallery (opens in a new tab) documented Varun Dhawan and Arjun Kapoor sharing their transformed photographs, alongside other performers who had tried the filter. You could compare a familiar actor’s present face with the app’s version without needing the effect explained.

Trying it on yourself added another kind of curiosity. Imagine showing the result to someone who knows your family. They might see a resemblance you hadn’t noticed, or disagree completely with the future hairstyle. A filter could give you a picture to pass around and a fairly easy conversation to start.

It was still an edited image, rather than a reliable prediction of how a person would age. The resemblance could be entertaining without becoming a forecast.

What happened to the photograph you uploaded?

The effect required a photograph to work on. As the aged faces circulated, attention also turned to the terms governing those uploads and the fact that editing involved the cloud.

The Indian Express’s contemporary explainer (opens in a new tab) reported FaceApp’s statement that most uploaded images were deleted from its servers within 48 hours. It also examined the permissions in the terms. The deletion statement was the company’s 2019 assurance, not an independent audit or a promise about every later version of the service.

A before-and-after image was much easier to understand than that discussion. You could see the changes to a face immediately. Working out what access you had granted, what happened on a server and how much trust to place in a statement took more effort.

The attraction had been so simple that those questions could feel like an unwelcome complication. They were still questions about the same photograph. Enjoying what came back didn’t settle what had happened to the original.

The filter made an oddly specific keepsake

FaceApp still offers a photo editor (opens in a new tab). The old-age selfies belong to a particular 2019 wave, rather than marking the whole life of the app.

If one of those images survives in a chat, it can look slightly strange now for a reason the original joke didn’t need to consider: some actual time has passed. You can compare yourself with a version of the future that a filter produced years earlier.

The app couldn’t tell you who you would become. It could give your friends a photograph to look at and somebody in the family an opportunity to point out that you had always looked like that relative.