The curious phenomenon of passport photos [Scanned]

Firstly, good news!  I have my new passport (finally!).  This is a Very Good Thing.   Secondly, I don’t really know how I managed it but I did.   For years I hated my passport photo.  About 6 months after I had it taken I cut all my hair off and for the majority of the next decade, wherever I went I had passport officials scrutinising my photo and me as if they were thinking ‘Is that really her?’  I even had bleach blonde short hair at one point and that took a little bit of explaining to the official I was trying to persuade to let me into Australia.   Even with the differences in hair style, I hated that photo.  I looked chubby, I looked pale (dark clothes didn’t help), my fringe was curling every which way and my eyebrows were in really, truly quite desperate need of an appointment with a lot of wax.   In effort to correct this with my shiny new passport, I wore a light shirt and my hair looked good and neat on the day I had the photos taken.  Of course, the Foreign Office then sent me the whole sodding application back as the photos had too much glare.  Grr.  So, I had them done at Australia Post across the road and that took 3 goes to get shots that were the right size and didn’t have any glare on them.    I was in a rush.  I was harassed and consequently, in my new passport photo, I look pale (dark tops again), my fringe is curling every which way and although I don’t look quite so chubby but there are more lines than a decade ago.  The only good thing about the whole debacle is that my eyebrows are now, at least, not in desperate need of tweezers.   I really don’t know how I managed to end up with a practically identical photo but I have.  I think cameras have it in for me.