The average person knows about 5,000 faces – from family and friends to the cashier at the local store. Most people can recognise familiar faces with ease, even from low quality images, or from photos that are many years old. We often recognise familiar faces even if we can’t remember a person’s name or how we know them. Most of us take this ability to recognise familiar faces for granted – but when public health issues require our friends to mask up, covering their chins, lips, cheeks and noses, are our facial recognition skills scrambled? We investigated this question in our recent study and compared the impact of masks (which cover the lower portion of the face) with that of sunglasses (which cover the eye region). Despite face masks covering a large proportion of our faces, we found that people find it surprisingly easy to recognise familiar faces behind masks – speaking to the remarkable versatility of this human skill.