# Failed-advice list — rebuild sheet

A 15-second front-camera selfie: a young woman with untreated acne holds one unmoving frame while four things people tell her to do appear one at a time, then she raises the product at the end. 30,335,961 views · 1,136,350 likes · @samaraghlatt · caption is empty.

**Why it works**
Every quoted line is advice the viewer has also been given, and the face on screen — bare, unretouched, unchanged for eleven straight seconds — silently proves each one didn't work. Because the frame never cuts and nothing is hidden, the condition itself is the argument, and the product lands in the only beat that isn't a quote.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1.21s | Chest-up selfie, pink satin bonnet, grey ribbed tank, bare skin with visible acne across forehead, cheeks, jaw and chest. Bedroom behind — shelves, plants, fairy lights — thrown soft. Flat expression, straight into the lens. | "Drink more water" |
| 3.64s | Same framing, same background. Only the mouth shifts. No cut is visible between beats. | "Do your skincare" |
| 6.06s | Same framing. Head slightly forward, chin down, same deadpan. | "Eat healthy" |
| 8.49s | Same framing. Small head tilt, lips pursed. Skin unchanged, still the biggest thing in frame. | "Take acne meds" |
| 10.92s | Same framing, no text — one silent beat of just the face after the list ends. | — |
| 13.34s | Half-turn and a small smile; a white pump bottle with a blue label comes into frame at lower-left and a green foil sachet at lower-right, with a dab of product on a fingertip held to camera. | — |

Not visible in the frames, said plainly: there is no audio track to read from a contact sheet, so whether she speaks, or what the sound is, is unknown. The product labels are mirrored by the front camera and only partly legible — the product is not identifiable from these stills. Whether the four text beats are one continuous take or invisible cuts also can't be confirmed from six frames; the framing and background are identical throughout, so treat it as one take.

**What carries the value**
The untreated skin, held unbroken and unretouched for the whole runtime. Each piece of advice is refuted by a face that visibly did not change. Nothing is styled away, nothing is cut around — that's the entire persuasion.

**Shoot it**
- **Camera:** phone front camera, vertical, held at eye level, one continuous take. No cuts, no zoom, no reframing. Hand-hold drift is fine and reads as honest; a tripod would read as produced.
- **Distance:** chest-up. The condition and the face must both be readable — close enough that texture is visible, wide enough that the room reads as a real room.
- **Light:** soft daylight from the front (face a window). Do not ring-light it — a ring light smooths texture, and texture is the evidence.
- **Wardrobe:** plain and domestic. Bonnet, tank top, no makeup, no jewellery styling. Whatever the person actually wears at home.
- **Room:** real bedroom, lived-in, slightly cluttered, in the background and out of focus. Never a set.
- **Performance:** none. No talking, no acting, no reaction takes. Look at the lens and let the beats pass. The only expression change across the whole video is a shift of the mouth.
- **Hard rule:** no retouching, no filters, no smoothing. If the condition gets softened in post, the video stops working.
- **What it needs:** a real person with the real visible condition. There's no performance and no script, so anyone can shoot it — but it cannot be faked, and it cannot be cast around.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 front-camera selfie photograph, {SUBJECT} shot chest-up and centred, filling most of the frame, head covered by a bright satin bonnet, plain ribbed tank top, bare face with no makeup and no retouching — the visible skin condition left exactly as it is, texture and marks fully readable — flat neutral expression looking directly into the lens, real bedroom behind with shelving and small warm string lights thrown soft by a shallow phone lens, even soft daylight from the front, phone-camera look with slight grain and mild front-camera distortion, no on-screen text
```

**Motion:** camera locked at eye level with only natural hand-hold drift for the entire runtime — nothing moves but the subject's expression, until the final beat where {PRODUCT} is raised into the bottom of the frame.

**Text overlay:** one quoted line per beat, white sans-serif, lower third, roughly centred, held ~2.4s each, then one beat with no text before the product beat —
"{advice people give you}" → "{advice people give you}" → "{advice people give you}" → "{advice people give you}"

A caution on generating this one: the whole format rests on an unfaked condition on a real body. A generated face reads as clean skin with marks drawn on it, and the argument dies. Generation is safe for the room, the framing and the beat timing; the subject is better shot.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ_FhlQv5Sx/
