k-emoji
// Put Hangul letters over your face.
/**
A selfie app that drops Korean letters onto your face. ㅋㅋ over the eyes, ㅠㅠ down the cheeks — the letters Koreans already type to laugh and cry.
Face detection runs on the phone with Apple's Vision framework. No sign-up, no upload. The photo never leaves your device, so there's nothing on a server to leak or lose.
I built it because the letters were already doing the work. ㅋ and ㅠ aren't decoration in Korean chat — they are the laugh and the tears. Turning them into a mask felt obvious once I saw it.
*/
# In Motion
Three short clips of the masks at work — letters landing on faces, a pattern filling the frame behind.
# Before and After
Same selfie, one tap apart. The face goes in plain and comes out wearing ㅋㅋ.
# Face Mode
The letters sit on the face itself — ㅋㅋ across the eyes, a single ㅠ down one cheek. Tap Add Jamo to stack more, then set the color (white, black, yellow, pink) and the weight from Thin to Heavy. A thin ㅎ reads quiet; a heavy one covers half the frame.
# Background Mode
This one cuts you out of the shot and fills the space behind with a wall of one letter. Pick the LETTER — LOL ㅋ, SMILE ㅎ, CRY ㅠ, TEARS ㅜ — and the BACKDROP color it repeats on. The result reads like a K-pop poster: you in front, the mood spelled out behind you.
# Stays on the Phone
Finding your face is Apple's Vision framework, running on the phone. Nothing gets sent anywhere. There's no account to make and no server behind the app, because a face is the last thing you'd want sitting in someone's database — so I didn't build one.
// no server · no account · nothing leaves the phone
#Why It's Built This Way
/**
Why jamo. Hangul letters have a shape you can read as a picture. ㅋ is a laugh, ㅠ is a cry — Koreans type them that way every day. So the mask isn't a random sticker. The letter already means something before it touches your face.
No accounts, on purpose. Face data is about as personal as it gets. The one honest way to promise it stays private is to have nowhere to put it. No login, no server, no copy of your photo anywhere but your phone.
18 locales at launch. The people this is for are young and everywhere, not just in Korea. So it shipped translated on day one instead of English-first-and-maybe-later.
*/
# Get It
Live on the App Store in 18 languages. Free to try.