Three people, two ink drums and an odd name

Where the name comes from

In art school, Margaux ran a riso zine called Facialesthe, a squashed-together “facial aesthetics” that was meant as a joke about judging everything by its face. Each issue surveyed something ordinary purely by how it looked at first glance: bus shelters, cereal boxes, the loading screens of phone games.

When the three of us started writing about browser games, the old title fitted surprisingly well. A game’s first screen is its face, and the pink pass judges exactly that. The word “survey” stands for the second, slower look, the one that checks whether the face was honest. Nothing here concerns skin care, and we are not a salon, though we do get the occasional email asking.