The artistic and logistical process behind creating celebrity wax figures is an incredibly elaborate, lengthy, and detail-oriented one. The sculpting, the painting, the wig-styling—a lot of care and talent goes into crafting a realistic resemblance. Have you seen the wax figures of Harry Styles and Rihanna? Stupendous! But every now and then, a celebrity wax figure misses the mark by miles (like Madame Tussaud’s 2017 Beyoncé statue—hoo boy). The latest: Panoptikum’s new Taylor Swift wax figure.
I want to approach this topic gently because I know an artist must have worked very hard to bring their vision of Taylor Swift to fruition, but objectively speaking, this isn’t so much a wax figure of Taylor Swift so much as it’s a wax figure of your one friend who thinks she looks like Taylor Swift because a Tinder match (who she didn’t even end up meeting) told her that once, like, eight years ago and no one in the friend group chat wants to be the one to tell her she doesn’t.
Revealed at Germany’s Panoptikum museum on Monday, August 12, the new Taylor Swift wax figure is wearing a knockoff of the superstar’s sequined 2019 iHeartRadio Music Awards romper—and that’s probably the most accurate part. Aside from the bangs looking freshly rained-on, there’s just something unnervingly off about her face. Perhaps her eyes are a bit too small and wide-set, or perhaps the jaw is too broad and square, but this looks more like a free-trial-of-an-AI-app imagining of Taylor Swift than the actual Taylor Swift.
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