You use your face to verify your identity in lots of situations, from picking up a parcel at the post office to going through border control. Each time you use photo-ID, someone is required to check that your face matches your ID document. Our research has shown that this process of matching an unfamiliar face to a photo is in fact very difficult, even for people like passport controllers. In this talk, I will describe some of our work on face recognition in the real world, and show how we have used this as a springboard to engage publics with our research through various different routes.