Most folks aren’t happy with their passport photos—it’s a gripe that can usually be attributed to poor lighting setups and the “let’s just get this over with” nature of the often unflattering results of an ID picture.
TikToker Bu-Wan (@antikpopstar) decided to go to CVS to get his passport photo done and ended up running into a problem that was much different than what this drug store customer experienced—he says that he ended up looking like “a criminal.”
He blames the issue on the fact that he has a face tattoo, a star-shaped ink right beneath his right eye, leaving the passport snap to look like a mugshot.
“Don’t ever get a face tattoo. I was at CVS trying to take my passport photos cause my passport expired and I know what I look like,” he says. “OK, so I try to soften my look every time I take a professional photo. So I’m sitting there and he’s like, ‘OKcan you look normal?’”
He emotes a bewildered expression in response to the CVS worker’s request to “look normal.”
“First off, sir, I’m trying, this is what I thought I look like,” he says, moving the camera lens away from his face to show off what he thinks he was going to look like in his picture: a smiley ‘normal-looking’ expression.
“But no my photo turned out like this,” he says, holding up the two CVS passport pictures to the lens.
“A criminal! I look like I just escaped North Korea,” he says at the end of the video before it ultimately closes out.
The TikToker writes in a text overlay of his video, “I need to erase all my tattoos help me”
@antikpopstar i need to erase all my tattoos help me #fyp #foryou #viralvideo #tattoo ♬ original sound – BU-WAN
Viewers hopped into the comments section to give some jokes of their own about the situation, with one writing, “Tattletale Strangler vibes.”
“Not the mugshot,” someone else quipped.
Another replied, “Stop u look like a cute lil gangster.”
As it turns out, however, several others encountered the same problem with passport photographs. One user said their husband made the mistake of donning an orange shirt while getting his picture taken.
“My husband wore an orange (?????) shirt for his passport photo and looks like a Guantanamo bay inmate ID,” they wrote.
Bu-Wan could console himself with the fact that he didn’t end up looking like a ghost in his picture, however.
“My man is pale with platinum hair, wearing a white shirt with a white background,” someone commented. “All you see is 2 floating blue eyes in his passport.”
One person joked that in any event, Bu-Wan could use those photos for his mugshot if he was ever arrested at any point in the future.
Afar writes that according to official guidelines about photo identification, including passport photos, folks can indeed rock facial art in their pictures, just so long as the face tattoos in question don’t make them unrecognizable: “The reasoning for all this is that facial features must be fully visible (including moles). That said, permanent facial tattoos are allowed, and jewelry—even facial piercings—can remain in place as long as it doesn’t obscure your face.”
And when it comes to social perceptions against folks with facial tattoos, Princeton Legal Journal writes that those who don ink on their faces aren’t necessarily protected against workplace discrimination for their ink: “Currently, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees and job applicants from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, but does not yet prohibit discrimination based on tattoos or other forms of body art.”
The legal resource went on to state that while workplaces can make requests of employees to cover up any of the tattoos on their bodies, they cannot make this a conditional rule, i.e. only make certain individuals of a particular ethnic background or ethnicity cover up their tats: Aas long as they are applied consistently and adhere to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidelines. For instance, employers can order all employees to cover up visible tattoos, but cannot apply such a rule only to males or people of a certain ethnicity.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Bu-Wan via TikTok comment and CVS via email.
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