We Tried To Fool iPhone X's Face ID — Here's How It Performed Under Pressure

Twins, newly grown beards, and caked on makeup — these are the three things Twitter users jumped on in the seconds after Apple announced that the iPhone X would replace Touch ID with a supposedly more secure feature, Face ID. Surely, many people speculated, one of those things could trip up Face ID and prevent you from unlocking your phone (or worse, incorrectly unlock it for someone else).

Evil twin jokes aside, their concerns are valid ones. If you pay the hefty $999 price tag, you want the iPhone X to be able to distinguish you from your genetic lookalike and recognize you're the same person even if you have a hat or a dramatic cat eye on.

In my first day with the iPhone X, I was impressed with Face ID. Compared to my tests with the facial recognition function on Samsung's Galaxy S8+, iPhone X was far easier to use — I was easily able to unlock my phone even when holding it off to the side or down by my waist.

Still, I was curious about how iPhone X would respond to various dramatic makeup and hair looks. Could the phone's TrueDepth Camera, which Apple says projects over 30,000 invisible dots to create a depth map of your face, still distinguish me after an over-the-top makeover? With the help of a hairstylist and makeup artist from GlamSquad, I put iPhone X's Face ID to the test and kept score while hamming it up along the way.