It is easy for some people to forget a face but what if it was your own face that you forgot?
Donna James and Victoria Wardley has been suffering with a rare condition called face blindness which makes them unable to identify people despite knowing them for years.
They even have trouble recognizing their own reflection in mirror.
Victoria, 32, says: “When I see someone’s face it’s like tunnel vision.
“I can make out an eye or a nose, but when I try and look at a whole face it just doesn’t work.
“It’s like a blank canvas on someone’s head.
“People I’ve known for ages will come up to me in the street, but until they introduce themselves I have no idea who they are.
“I’m not really sure what I look like, and I couldn’t even describe my husband to you either.
“We rarely take any pictures because there’s no point – we’d have no idea who was in the photo.”
The sisters, from York, discovered their condition when Victoria’s doctor noticed she kept blanking him when he walked into the coffee shop where she worked.
He called her in for tests – and eventually both she and Donna were diagnosed with the problem.
Donna, 30, said: “I’d always thought I just wasn’t paying enough attention to people. In a way it was a relief to know something was wrong.
“I’d gone up to men in supermarkets thinking they were my partner, only to realize I’d grabbed hold of the wrong man!
“I even find it hard to pick out my daughter in a crowd. I feel so guilty sometimes. I should know what my own child looks like – but I just find it impossible.”
The condition means that the sisters rarely go out together.
Victoria says: “If we got split up we’d never find each other again.
“It happened in a supermarket once and I had to ask them to put out a Tannoy announcement as if she was a lost kid. It was so embarrassing.”
She recalls another time when she was working as a bar manager and trying to get to the kitchen with an armful of empties.
She said: “This woman got in my way and I just couldn’t get her to move.
“I was getting so annoyed I started shouting at her – it took me a couple of minutes to realize that I was arguing with my own reflection.”
Dr Sarah Bate, of the Centre for Face Processing Disorders at Bournemouth University said the condition, known as prosopagnosia, may affect up to one in 50 people.
