Social media users shared posts online featuring a photo of a woman wearing a human-faced hat and claiming to be Taylor Swift. This claim is false: the hat was created by artists in Australia for special effects for films, and the model in the image is not identified.
Examples can be seen here and here. One post’s description reads: “Taylor Swift’s human flesh hat.”
Comments on the posts include “It looks disgusting !! Why would you wear something like that anyway”, “Animal! #SAVEOURCHILDEN”, ”They also make purses, I saw she was sick” and “Money will and the soul corrupts .. ”
A reverse Google Images search on the photo reveals that it appears in an article on the Indonesian website merdeka.com here. The article refers to the creators Kayla Arena and Toby Barron.
Facebook pages for the couple (here, here) show that they create a variety of special effects items for films based in Australia. The photo in the claim is visible on Arena’s Facebook page here, posted on October 15, 2016.
Arena did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other similar hats are also visible here, here and here.
VERDICT
Untrue. The photo shows an unidentified model with a hat created by special effects artists in Australia.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.