Almost every day, we scroll past a passport photo. They stand out; one of the few remaining images that produces visual sameness inside a feed engineered for constant mutation. The passport picture – along with its cousins, the photobooth picture and the driver’s license picture – is a relic that we just can’t shake. For something so anti-aesthetic (blank expression, sterile lighting, government-imposed symmetry), its appeal endures. Showing up on dating profiles, Tumblr, Pinterest moodboards, lovers’ lockets, vintage markets, beauty edits, the covers of mixtapes, the backs of phone cases and our camera rolls, it has been cemented as a staple aesthetic.

For celebrities, achieving a “good” ID picture has become practically a sport. In 2007, as part of the documentary Victoria Beckham: Coming to America, Victoria Beckham arrives at the DMV with a full glam team. “Can we do another one? My hair looks flat. Do you do retouching?” she jokes to the unamused employees. Kim Kardashian similarly turned her licence renewal into a full-scale production in an episode of The Kardashians. When Kylie Jenner shared her driver’s license photo on Instagram in 2020, it racked up millions of likes, and almost as many headlines. Somewhere along the way, legal documentation quietly crossed into beauty culture and became something of a status symbol. “Having a great passport photo feels almost aspirational,” says Nicole, an assistant product developer. “Even if the only person seeing it is a border agent, it feels important to have a picture you won’t be embarrassed about.”

The passport portrait itself was born in the early 20th century, as borders tightened and governments demanded machine-readable faces. Then came commercial photobooths in the 1920s, then pictures in driver’s licenses and suddenly ID photography collided with youth culture and art. From Cindy Sherman’s 1975 series photographing herself shifting between masculine and feminine guises, to Nadia Lee Cohen project of 33 character-driven portraits, artists have long used the 35mm box of the passport-style headshot, though designed as neutral documentation, as a performance space for beauty and transformation. The limitations – cramped frame, fixed angles, positions, background and lighting – fostering, rather than hampering, creativity.

Of course, TikTok has turned the passport photo into a full-blown beauty trend. Passport make-up tutorials with millions of views (Georgia Barratt’s, for example, has been viewed 16.2 million times) promise the perfectly effortless face under lighting designed to humble. The recipe is always the same: matte skin that refuses to shimmer, a light base, softly defined brows, shallow sculpted eyes in strict neutrals, a soft pink under the eye, brown on the lids, never sparkly, ideally with a barely extended brown liner. Lashes are long but not dramatic, lips in muted pinks or near nudes, and contour is placed with forensic precision along the cheeks, jawline and bridge of the nose. Highlighter is banned and SPF is treacherous because of flashback. The aim is a face that appears naturally symmetrical, and snatched. 

Having a “good” passport picture then becomes the ultimate flex. “With only three chances, cramped space and unflattering lighting, it’s not easy to look good in a passport pic,” says Marta, a photo assistant in her early 20s living in New York. The fixed angle and stark lighting offer nothing to hide behind, no tricks to help flatter or soften. “The Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police,” as Roland Barthes said in 1979. So to come out looking good has become aspirational, something to be flaunted on social media. 

For others, the appeal lies in the format’s rigidity. “What I love about passport photos is that they’re such a limited frame – it’s essentially just your face against a white background,” Nicole, an assistant product developer from Italy, based in London, says. “It’s fun to express yourself within those constraints, and end up with the ‘best’ version of yourself, even if that version was very curated”. Mary, a CSM student studying industrial design from Germany, echoes this archival impulse. She loves lining up her new passport photos alongside old ones, using their sameness as a measuring tool. “It’s always the same backdrop and lighting, so it’s the one way you can accurately see how you’ve changed,” she tells me. 

For make-up artist Vlada Krukovskaya, the passport photo isn’t just inspiration – it’s a whole beauty language. She’s known online for her flat-lit, head-on looks: poppy colour palettes, 2000s-sharp overlined lips, fake piercings and skunk-stripe extensions. “I haven’t found a better angle for myself than a passport-style photo,” she tells me. “It shows a face without good or bad angles. The make-up is honest. I’ve tried other approaches, but this one is mine. My document photos make me look like a tortured person with a hundred criminals,” she laughs. But in that deadpan frontality, the look hits harder: the make-up becomes the performance.

The passport photo, repurposed for aesthetics rather than admin, becomes a personal record, a documentation of time, proof of how we looked, even as we change. Today, an expired passport photo, wonky fringe, teenage acne, awkward glare, will almost inevitably make its way onto Instagram as a reminder of an awkward era, proof of a “glow up”. In this sense, the passport pic is also a marker of transitions: the year you cut your hair, the era you bleached your eyebrows, or had eyebrow blindness.