Four printed faces fit on one table with about an inch of wood to spare between them.
Each one supposedly belongs to the same person — the man some psychic artist decided was my soulmate — except none of them share so much as an eyebrow shape. That's the actual problem I've spent over a year trying to solve: not whether any of this is real, but how you compare four strangers' faces without either losing your mind or just picking the cutest one.
I'm not going to re-explain what a soulmate sketch even is, or how far back this kind of spiritual portraiture actually goes, or how these artists say they see a stranger's future partner in the first place — I've gone deep on all three of those elsewhere, and this one is specifically about what happens once four of them are sitting in front of you, demanding to be ranked.
Face First or Words First?
There are really only two ways to run this comparison, and I've tried both more times than I'd like to admit. The first is face-first: lay out the printouts, compare jawlines and hair color and whatever mood each artist went for, and trust your gut reaction to the image itself. It's fast, it's visceral, and I'm fairly convinced now it's the weaker method if you actually care about the reading underneath the picture.
Every sketch I've ordered showed up the same way: a JPEG file landing in my inbox at some odd hour, no ceremony attached. Comparing four of those on a phone screen is close to useless — the lighting on your display skews warm or cool depending on the app, and you end up judging an image file instead of a person.
So I print everything at standard US letter size, assuming the artist delivered a file with enough resolution to survive it. Anything thinner than that turns into a smudge the second you blow it up, and you lose exactly the kind of fine detail a face-first comparison depends on — the set of the eyes, the little asymmetries that make a drawing feel like a specific person instead of a stock photo.
Part of why face-first comparison gets messy fast is that the four services I've used don't even play the same game — different price tiers, different guarantees if you're unhappy with the result, some artists working digitally and some clearly by hand, and at least one sales pitch I'd flag as a little too eager. I've broken each of those apart separately rather than cramming all of it in here.
Why I Stopped Trusting My Eyes First
Somewhere around sketch number three, I started suspecting the face-first method was just measuring my own bias back at me. My ex had a very specific look, and every drawing that resembled him even slightly got an automatic, unfair demotion in my head, while anything that looked different got a bump it probably hadn't earned on merit alone.
That's the opposite of what you want if the whole point is giving your intuition room to say something your logical brain would've vetoed on sight. So the second method, the one I trust more these days, is reading-first: flip every sketch face down, read only the written character analysis that comes with it, and decide which personality you respond to before you've seen a single face.
There's a separate question of how you'd even grade accuracy in the first place, whether a given sketch reads closer to a twin flame than a soulmate, and why the drawing that least resembles your usual type might end up being the most useful data point of all — plus the patterns that only show up once you've got more than two sketches on the table at once. Those are each their own rabbit hole, and not this one.
The Spreadsheet That Doubles as a Character Witness
Okay so once you've run both methods on four sketches, you need somewhere to put the results that isn't just loose paper sliding around a drawer. Mine is a spreadsheet, and yes, I know exactly how that sounds coming from someone with this many printouts.
A reader named Margot Vesely emailed me once after ordering from a service I'd reviewed pretty favorably, describing an experience that barely resembled mine — same company, a completely different timeline, a completely different tone in the reading itself. Margot's email is actually the reason I started timing every delivery window and noting what headspace I was in before I even opened the file, both of which I track in detail now, just not inside this particular post.
The spreadsheet itself, and the difference between a service that hands you a sketch versus one that hands you a full written story, is a whole separate conversation I've had elsewhere. Here it's just the thing that turns four isolated reactions into something you can actually weigh against each other instead of relying on memory.
When the Blind Method Backfires
Reading a character analysis with no face attached works great for sketches sitting on a table. It falls apart completely in real life, which I learned the slow way after joining a singles hiking meetup group that promised something similar: judge the person, not the profile picture. It didn't work. People still showed up exactly as curated as any dating app, and I spent several Saturdays at Clark Park in West Philadelphia being extremely polite to men I had zero actual interest in.
Phoebe Mull, a childhood friend from two houses down, calls me almost before I've finished writing up a new sketch, sometimes mid-sentence in whatever notes app I'm using at the time. I've got a screenshot saved from one comparison night, timestamped absurdly late, with no caption underneath it, because by then neither of us needed one. Send it to the group chat and you can practically hear the notifications pile up before you've even set your phone back down.
What you're supposed to do with any of this once you've picked a "winner," and how your friends tend to react when you actually show them the sketch instead of just describing it, are questions I've answered in more detail elsewhere. Here, Phoebe's reaction is just useful shorthand for how fast a private little exercise turns semi-public.
Which Method Actually Wins
Here's where I've landed after four sketches and probably too many spreadsheet columns. Face-first comparison earns its keep when you're mainly evaluating the artist — judging style and technique, whether a service's "hand-drawn" claim actually holds up against another one's obviously digital line work. Reading-first earns its keep when you suspect your own type is doing the judging for you, which, if you've just come out of a relationship, it almost certainly is.
Use both, and the order matters less than the fact that you're running the comparison twice, from two different angles, instead of trusting a single glance across the table. Skip the blind method entirely and you'll probably just reconfirm whatever your ex already wired you to prefer. Skip the face-first method and you'll never notice if one artist is quietly phoning it in.
If you want the service-by-service version of this — which artist, which price range, which one I'd actually order from again — I already laid all of that out in my soulmate sketch rabbit hole comparison experience, which is less about method and more about naming names.
None of this tells you whether any of these men exist, and I'm not pretending otherwise. What it tells you is which sketch earned its spot through more than just a flattering jawline, and which one you'd have dismissed on looks alone if you hadn't flipped it over first. That's the whole method. It isn't romantic. It's just the only way I've found to compare four strangers without the comparison itself turning into one more reason to feel bad about being single.