Uncanny Valley, Population: One

Elise Bahía is twenty-two years old, Norwegian, and looks like a toy manufacturer’s concept sketch of a human woman. The face is porcelain-smooth, symmetrical beyond anything random, eyes a fraction too large. She runs a blog called Living Doll and she’s committed to the bit in every photograph—the expression, the angles, the construction of a person who appears to have been manufactured rather than born.

It’s attractive and unsettling in roughly equal measure, which is probably the point. The uncanny valley usually applies to robots trying too hard to pass as human; here it’s a human trying to pass as a very expensive object, and the effect lands in its own category of strange. I kept looking anyway. The whole internet did.

She was flying around the world with friends, building a following, getting free razors in the mail—the full early-2010s blogger economy, running on aesthetics and sponsorship and the particular attention that comes with looking like nothing else in the room. Whether any of it was natural or surgically assisted or bankrolled by someone with money and an interest in the outcome, the blog wasn’t offering clarification. It didn’t need to. The ambiguity was the product.

The honest reaction was: I was into it and slightly bothered by being into it. Which is probably the correct reaction.