The Mission: Impossible masks are almost a reality

polygon.com:

The first time Jonna Mendez wore a lifelike human mask, she grew increasingly paranoid. In the midst of a training exercise to test going undercover, the CIA’s former chief of disguise had chosen to stroll around Georgetown and impersonate a Black woman, wearing red stilettos and intricately-laced gloves to cover her extremities. But as she walked into a store, she couldn’t help but feel as though the woman behind the checkout counter was watching her. After quickly exiting, she was greeted by pouring rain and intense humidity, which began to fog up her glasses, trapping her as she waited for a surveillance team to pick her up. “It was a nightmare,” she says. “I had a worst-case scenario wearing that mask the very first time.”

The second time wearing one went much smoother. To show president George H.W. Bush the advances in the CIA’s mask technology, Mendez waited outside the Oval Office and nervously chewed her pencil in total disguise, this time masked as a female colleague. Upon entering with a group of men, including NSA advisor Brent Scowcroft and CIA director William H. Webster, Bush asked Mendez what she’d brought to show him. “I’m wearing it and I’ll take it off,” she said. After a brief inspection, the president gave up guessing what she was hiding, prompting Mendez to peel off her mask to the room’s delight. “It was definitely cool,” she says. “If you kept it on long enough, you’d forget you had it on.”

By the early 1990s, the CIA’s mask technology had far superseded Hollywood’s, allowing for spy work to occur within feet of unsuspecting targets and marks. Several years later, Tom Cruise pulled off the same deceptive maneuver, only this time with the help of a visual effects team and months of carefully