A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.
A photo of an ordinary household air dehumidifier that by chance looks like a smiling face from the front and a frightened grimace from behind in the mirror reflection went viral on Reddit in 2019 and became a visual metaphor for human duplicity.
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In spring 2019, a photo of an ordinary household air dehumidifier standing on a shelf beside a mirror appeared in the me_irl subreddit on Reddit. The picture earned a notable number of upvotes and quickly became one of the most prominent viral images of its time, spreading to numerous entertainment sites and content aggregators beyond Reddit itself.
The photo's popularity came down to a lucky combination of circumstances: the elements of the device's front panel, two small indicator lights and a curved ventilation grille, form something resembling a smiling face, while the back of the unit, visible in the mirror reflection, looks like a distorted grimace of horror or a scream. This contrast between the calm 'face' at the front and the frightened 'face' in the reflection became the visual basis of the meme.
The day after the photo was posted, users began turning it into a full-fledged meme. Because the appliance so clearly resembled a human face, people started associating it with their own emotional state: outward calm over inner fear or anxiety. For a short time the format was actively riffed on Reddit in the form of captions and comments, but soon, as often happens with viral images, interest in it faded for a while.
Later that summer the image had a second surge of interest: the photo again hit Reddit's 'Hot' feed and also spread to Pikabu (a Russian link-sharing and community site), Twitter and other platforms. Such a repeat wave of virality is not unusual for successful visual finds. After some time, the image felt new to many users again, and the joke about the two-faced appliance seemed fresh once more.
The main reason for the meme's staying power is its universality as a metaphor. The air dehumidifier picture is a good fit for almost any situation where a person's outward behavior diverges from their inner state: putting on a show of calm in front of others while panicking alone, or a polite smile to an interlocutor while thinking something entirely different.
Typical captions for the image go something like: 'me on a call: everything's under control; me inside: everything's on fire,' or 'outside, nothing, all fine; inside, a silent scream,' playing on the contrast between the smiling front of the device and the distorted face in the mirror reflection.
The accident that made an ordinary household appliance resemble two different facial expressions at once sets this meme apart from other examples of pareidolia in internet culture, the human tendency to find faces and emotions in inanimate objects. Unlike many similar finds, the effect here is amplified by the mirror's fortunate placement, which literally splits the object into two simultaneously visible 'faces' with opposing expressions. That gives the picture extra expressiveness and semantic depth compared with a generic 'object with eyes.'
It also matters that the author of the original photo remains unknown. The picture spread across the web without any name attached, and none of the sites that reposted it could establish who took it or under what circumstances, so the meme's authorship has remained anonymous.
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