“Face to Face with Bread Face” is an excerpt from Daily Bread, the upcoming Winter 2025 issue of Cake Zine, a print magazine exploring art, history, and pop culture through food.
An unidentified woman, the upper half of her face guillotined by the camera angle, caresses an Italian panettone. Her purple stiletto nails match her wig. Stylistically it looks like if Tim Burton shot a porno—suggestive shots of tanned dough cast in a ghoulish light. A song plays behind her: “Here Tonight” by Doss. Her shirt is @Frame, the nails are @beetlesgelpolish (not paid placements but intel for the curious). The panettone is stale enough that she has to grasp the back of her neck and push her own head down to flatten it. But she is stronger than the bread. This is Bread Face.
There are hundreds of these videos, each captioned with a neat label that identifies the bread, the song, and often the outfit, alongside a series of hashtags like: #oddlysatisfying #breadfaceblog #breadface #asmr #bread #asmr #breadfacing. In another video she approaches a Marks and Spencer Battenberg cake, turning the confection so that its checkered top is tilted vertically. Then, as “Grace” by The Durutti Column plays, she lowers her face onto the column of cake, pink and white stuffing smashing onto her cheeks, crumbs catching in her lashes.
In 2015, Bread Face posted her first video on Instagram, smooshing her face quickly into a Martin’s potato roll to “Trap Queen” by Fetty Wap. Her hair was shorter, her nails were shorter, but the essence of what Bread Face was to become was already there. The anonymous woman behind the account immediately fascinated the internet. She inspired imitators (“I Tried Breadfacing—Now I Understand”), guides (“Breadfacing: It’s a Thing”), interviews (“Getting weird with mystery Instagrammer Bread Face, the best performance artist you’ll never know”) and even a New York Times profile.
Bread Face captured the public imagination for a couple key reasons. The first was the confidence with which she executed what would typically be considered an intrusive thought. In some way, Bread Face deals in wish fulfillment: What would your life be like if you could indulge in any whim? Second, the ambiguity of her content: Was it porn or was it art? Despite the endless debate from viewers, writers, and commentators, Bread Face ignored those labels, pausing only to toy with people’s perception. In her hashtags she might wink at the erotic fascination that others sometimes identify in her project (#creampie #perverts she captioned the announcement for a specialty Bread Face “face flavored donut” at Wildair), but at the same time, she was breadfacing at the 2019 Seattle Art Fair. Then, there was her dedication to anonymity at a moment when the financial seed of internet celebrity was first bearing fruit. In 2016, Daniel Lara was “back at it again with the white Vans,” appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres show to receive a lifetime supply of kicks. Exploring the internet, via doom scroll or idle surf, is a journey motivated by an unplaceable urgency: Somewhere, something out there will spark a feeling, and you can’t stop until you find it. Those who touched virality were urged to cash out: be on Ellen, heck, get your own talk show, but Bread Face resisted. Bread Face was called an artist, a visionary, a rapacious shtick exploiter, and a fetishist.
Now Breadfaceblog is nearly ten years old. She still posts, but less frequently. Who was the mysterious woman behind it? What are the remnants of the trend? How do we slice it?
I met with Bread Face over Zoom to find out. A trim young woman sat in front of a blurred background. Although anonymous, Bread Face has revealed in interviews that she’s worked in creative fields as a writer. Despite the mechanism of her celebrity (literally planting her face into bread), Bread Face has maintained that anonymity, divorcing recognition from retention. You can see her face in the videos, watch the dough stick to her skin, yet she is unrecognizable, a feat at a time when people have more parasocial relationships than real ones and doxxing is an unfortunate standard. “I think I’m lucky because I’m Asian,” she tells me. “There’s this social element of, I don’t think anyone wants to risk being like, are you Bread Face?” She smiles slightly. “And then I can just be like, ‘No, that’s another Asian girl.’”
Her trick of anonymity is identical to the trick of breadfacing—convincing an audience that what they know to be true (how one interacts with bread), isn’t. Cream puff, donut, naan, fa gao, cheesecake, babka, cronut, Cinnabon, youtiao, focaccia (from Costco), hamburger bun, angel food cake, bagel, shokupan, sourdough, orange cake, zucchini bread, croissant, the list is extensive. Many of these are not bread—but what is bread to Bread Face?
It’s delicious, it’s finite, and it’s sexy. Every bread, she tells me, feels different on the face. The less nutritional the bread, the better. Bread Face has an encyclopedic knowledge of pastry, aware of its architecture, intimacies, and inadequacies. A seeded bread can injure you and make you break out (seed oils are comedogenic). A green tea cake is moist and nurturing. A baguette or sourdough robust and full-bodied. In part, the sex appeal of bread starts at the source: “In terms of the food world, Bakers are fucking weird,” she says. “They’re always awake when no one else is, and they put so much love and care into this thing that will just be gone the next day. . . I think the fact that it expires has something to do with why it’s so sexy.”
Over the past decade, Bread Face has slowly migrated her work to subscription-based sites like Patreon and OnlyFans. She posts less publicly and less often, mostly redirecting people to her privately paid platforms. Her Patreon and OnlyFans are almost like a video diary—breadfacing, yes, but also even more experimental video work, music videos, and short films she’s directed both for herself and other artists. Despite having received critical success for her work, Bread Face acknowledges the often-small-minded public perception of her project. “It’s a double standard. People are always like, it’s a fetish, it’s a fetish. But I’m like, if I were white or if I were a dude no one would ever say that. It would just be, like, this is dumb, but it’s still art.” Picking a platform like OnlyFans is suggestive, but Bread Face challenges siloing: Maybe it’s sexy and fetishistic, but it’s also performance.
She hits her vape. “Have you ever tried it?” she asks me. By “it” she meant breadfacing. Momentarily I feel ashamed, like I haven’t done my journalistic due diligence, but she is gentle with me. She suggests I start with a cream tea roll cake, vertically. “Just feeling the layers and the coldness of the cream. It’s really nice.” Her voice is a little wobbly. “It’s the craziest feeling after, like you just feel so insanely stupid. It’s like having a one-night stand. You know? It’s just like, wow, I can’t believe I did that. And who the fuck was I in that moment? Because you sort of like, black out a little bit. I just feel like you’re like a different person in those moments.”
While performing, Bread Face is a different person, or a different version of herself, both sensual and violent. In her videos, she plays a character, she tells me: a “sexy, lonely, mysterious, isolated, agoraphobic girl with a tic,” a desire to smash her face into bread. Recently, she’s started to dissolve the line between character and creator.
“I used to keep the real world out of my account,” she tells me, “not wanting to be transparent about my personal life or how I moved in the world because I saw Bread Face as an escape.” But for the past year, Bread Face has been using her platform to post opportunities for her followers to take action, recently soliciting donations for Palestinian families displaced in Egypt. In return for raising $18,457 with five others, she breadfaced into an aish baladi—an Egyptian flatbread made of whole wheat. In June, she went to Egypt with a group of activists to pass out the donations to organizers and refugees. “If you’re afraid to speak up because you might compromise getting some brand deal, not only are you a coward but you’re probably talentless,” she says. “What’s the point of influence if we can’t facilitate what should be a revolution?”
I can easily picture the alternate path available to Bread Face, one that the current crop of hybrid fashion/art/foodfluencers like Nara Smith (“I fucking love her,” Bread Face tells me) or Gabbriette work toward—financially lucrative but spiritually void. I picture her at the front row of fashion shows or mushing her face into a bag made of bread. But, she was always clear: “In the end, I was like, do I really want to do any of that shit? And it was always: No.”
If yesterday’s Bread Face was prescient, today’s is utterly present: unwilling to compromise her art or her morality. Even her use of hashtags (the internet’s vestigial organ), where you can never tell if she’s being genuine or making fun of you foreshadowed the irony/sincerity conversation that would come to a head in the next decade. She still breadfaces for her own pleasure, outside of the screen. On her birthday, she told me, she breadfaced into a slice of cake. And every now and then, when she’s out in public, she’ll give her face a sensitive pat with a croissant. I asked her what she learned from breadfacing. She giggled, “That I’m always right.”