Press
A vase made from the people in it
Send a photograph, and the profile in it becomes the outline of a vase. One face, or as many as six. No two are ever the same, because no two faces are.
The object
A Fahz is a vase generated from photographs of people in profile. The profile becomes the vase’s own outline. Rubin’s vase, populated.
It is not a picture of a face. It is the face.
Even numbers pair off and look at each other across the vase. Odd numbers do not. Turn it, and each person arrives in turn. Underneath, a small notch marks the position of every profile.
Nobody needs the trick explained. People find it on their own, and then they turn it around and hand it to somebody else so they can find it too.
Now I see it. All I saw was the white thing.
Savannah Guthrie, on air, TODAY, 4 May 2017
Five inches or three, and one to six faces on either. Printed to order in PLA, a plant-derived plastic.
Its history
Fahz began as an overly ambitious Mother's Day present. Rather than give his wife Martha a vase, Nicholas Desbiens wrote a program that generates them. He has said, more than once, that he could also have just bought a card.
The Kickstarter went up in January 2015 against a $10,000 goal and closed at $61,102 from 965 backers. The Daily Mail called. It reached national television two years later.
Then the more interesting thing happened, which is that it kept running. Between 2015 and 2018 more than a thousand vases were generated from strangers' photographs. Every one different from every other. Every one chosen and paid for by the person who received it.
What stopped it was not demand, and it was not the software. That was ambitious for its moment and did more of the work than people assume. The geometry followed a fabrication logic, so bad builds were rare, and batches of eight ran overnight and were ready by morning.
What did not scale was everything downstream of the printer. Labels, padding, packing, the drive to the post office. All the little stuff that no amount of clever geometry could remove, multiplied by every order, against a full-time job and two young children.
Its present
None of that lands on one person now. Fahz is still Nicholas Desbiens, still in Brooklyn. What changed is that the repetitive work, the part that used to fill his evenings one order at a time, is done by software he wrote for the purpose. The design is still his. The printing happens at a partner’s print farm in the United States, and the vase ships from there about two weeks after it is ordered.
You upload a photograph from a phone, and a few seconds later you are looking at your vase.
From there the customer becomes a co-designer. You decide the order the faces sit in, which is the same as deciding who looks at whom. You turn the vase while it regenerates, and you change your mind as often as you like. None of it commits you to anything. You see the finished vase before you buy it, and the file reaches a printer only once you have.
Nothing is warehoused. Nothing is forecast. Nothing is made on the chance that somebody might want it.
Fahz returns to Kickstarter on Wednesday 7 October 2026, a decade after the first campaign, and runs through Monday 2 November; the campaign page is already up, and the people who backed it then heard first. Ordering at fahzface.com opens to everyone in November, ahead of Black Friday, which is to say in time for the holidays, which is to say the deadline is real.
Its future
Ten years ago Kickstarter asked Nicholas Desbiens where design was heading. He said he hoped design and architecture would begin to look and feel more effortless, regardless of how much complexity sits inside the finished thing.
That is still the ambition, and it is what a Fahz is for. Every one is a different solid, generated from a different pair of faces, and none of that is the customer's problem. They send a photograph. They turn the vase. They decide.
What interests him is what the computation is for. It is usually asked to make things faster, cheaper, or more numerous. It is rarely asked to make one matter more. A Fahz is made by a machine and is still about somebody in particular, and it is the only one of its kind, not as a selling point but as a consequence of how it was made.
The longer version of that argument, about what it actually costs to make one thing at a time, is written up separately.
An object made for one person is an object that person keeps.
Images
Free for editorial use with the credit line Courtesy of Fahz. The kit holds these at full resolution, the same renders on black, the turntable loop, the phone walkthrough, four portraits to choose between, two animations of how a vase is made, nine images from the original run, and the marks. Every file is described.
Download the press kit (106 MB)Browse every image, describedDownload the turntableDownload the turntable, filmedDownload the turntable, filmed, verticalDownload the walkthrough
The record
- $61,102
- raised against a $10,000 goal, January 2015
- 965
- backers in thirty days. A Kickstarter Project We Love
- 600
- vases sold in the first ten days
- 1,000+
- unique vases made and shipped, 2015 to 2018
Where it has been
- 2015
- BKLYN DESIGNS, Brooklyn’s design fair, in May. Inhabitat’s 2015 Green Awards, Editors’ Choice.
- 2015
- STORY, the Chelsea concept shop that rebuilt itself around a new theme every few weeks, invited Fahz into its Creativity edition. The fahz-o-matic ran live in the shop on 27 June.
- 2015
- Brooklyn-Made, certified Gold, by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. The subject of a master’s case study in mass customization at Politecnico di Milano.
- 2015
- Holiday gift guides: InStyle online in November, and Brooklyn Magazine’s 100 Brooklyn design objects we love in December.
- 2015
- Kickstarter’s Design and Tech night at its Brooklyn headquarters, in December, alongside Artiphon and OpenBCI.
- 2016
- Kickstarter asked Nicholas Desbiens twelve questions on the future of design, and sent a producer to Brooklyn to film him and the vases for its film in the Design Museum’s Designer Maker User gallery in London, which opened that November.
- 2017
- TODAY, 4 May. Fahz made a vase from the anchors’ own profiles for the segment, and Savannah Guthrie found the faces on air.
- 2021
- Code as Creative Medium: A Handbook for Computational Art and Design, by Golan Levin and Tega Brain, MIT Press. A Fahz is the full-page image that opens the book’s “Parametric Object” assignment, on page 123.
Facts
- Product
- A vase generated from photographs of people in profile, made to order.
- Sizes
- Five inch and three inch. One to six faces on either.
- Price
- $70 and $35. Free shipping in the US.
- Available
- Back on Kickstarter from Wednesday 7 October 2026, through 2 November. Ordering at fahzface.com from November 2026, ahead of Black Friday. Made to order, about two weeks to the door.
- Material
- PLA, a plant-derived and recyclable plastic, in a choice of finishes.
- Founded
- Nicholas and Martha Desbiens, Brooklyn, New York, 2014.
- Today
- Nicholas Desbiens, Brooklyn, New York. Printed to order at a partner’s print farm in the United States.
- Founder
- “I am an architect, computational designer, and, most recently, the creator of Fahz, the 3D printing project that lets you put your face in a vase.”
- Previously in
- Gizmodo, Laughing Squid, New Atlas, 3D Printing Industry, 3DPrint.com, Brooklyn Magazine, Daily Mail, Wired Italia, Der Standard, de Volkskrant, Inhabitat, InStyle. Featured on TODAY, May 2017.
- Links
- Fahz 2.0 on Kickstarter, the 2026 campaign, launching 7 October
The 2015 Kickstarter campaign
12 Questions on the Future of Design, Kickstarter, 2016
Lot Size One, an essay on making one thing at a time
The TODAY segment, 4 May 2017, from 4:47
Inhabitat 2015 Green Awards, Editors’ Choice, BKLYN DESIGNS
Code as Creative Medium, Golan Levin and Tega Brain, MIT Press, 2021
fahzface.com - Contact
- nick@fahzface.com
An offer, if it helps
If it would help to hold one
Some desks test what they cover and some cannot accept anything at all, so this is an offer and not a parcel. If a sample would help, send a photograph of anyone you like and we will make a vase from it and post it to you, free of charge and with no obligation. Yourself, your mother, whoever. If your rules say no, no hard feelings.