Woman’s Passport Photo Goes Catastrophically Wrong

A woman’s passport photo mishap has gone viral after she appeared “microwaved” in her official document photo.

Rebekah Roark’s post on TikTok has received over 16 million views after she wrote, “Went to update my passport photo and…” while joking that she is “calling the police” over the photos.

The hilarious photo has caused much laughter and amusement for Roark and everyone else who has seen it. Users compared the passport photo to the “baby head spider thing from Toy Story, Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter, and Michael Myers from the Halloween film series.

How Did the Passport Photo Go So Wrong?

Roark, who is from Jena, Louisiana, tells Newsweek that a routine trip to get a new passport photo on July 18 was all going fine — except the usual photographer wasn’t there, so another worker stepped in to do the job.

The photo got taken, Roark looked at it, and agreed that it was fine. But then she saw a set of prints where the photo looked totally different.

“The usual passport photographer wasn’t in and so we both agreed we would try anyway,” Roark tells Newsweek. “If it didn’t work, I could come back when the photographer was in the office. When I first saw the photos, I instinctively laughed obnoxiously loud in a library-esque area. But I remember this photographer telling me, ‘this is why I only do these once a year’.”

When the replacement photographer went to print out Roark’s photo, they inserted the photo paper the wrong way round, resulting in the image being printed on the anti-slip side that usually has some branding on it.

It was presumably a piece of inkjet paper designed to be used with an inkjet printer. And when it is inserted the wrong way, the ink bleeds out, causing a blurry, feathered image, as seen in Roark’s photo.

If you are thinking of taking your own passport photo, then why not check out PetaPixel’s guide on how to take your passport photo at home.