Lunar New Year Portraits

The Lunar New Year register

Lunar New Year — Chinese New Year, the Spring Festival — is the most photographed fortnight of the year for a billion people: lanterns strung overhead, fai-chun couplets pasted at the door, plum blossom forced into early bloom, and everyone in their best red. Red is not decoration here, it is the whole grammar of the festival — luck, warmth, the year turned over. This pack puts you inside that frame rather than next to it.

Three looks carry it. The first is the classic festive qipao: red-and-gold brocade with a stiff mandarin collar and frog clasps, gold peony embroidery, slim gold earrings and a bangle, set in a courtyard strung with red paper lanterns and a carved timber moon gate, lit warm by lantern-glow. The second is a modern editorial — a clean contemporary red silk dress against a bright plastered wall hung with fai-chun couplets and a sprig of plum blossom, even and high-key. The third is blossom-and-gold: an embroidered red silk top worked with gold thread and a soft mandarin neckline, amid plum-blossom branches and gilt prosperity decor in soft daylight.

Each look is shot three ways — the angle, the crop and the colourway shift from lacquer red through scarlet to prosperity-red, the background moving from lantern-courtyard to plastered wall to blossom branch — so the nine portraits read like a real New Year shoot, not the same frame nine times. The face stays fully visible in every one; nothing veils it.

These are photographs, not paintings. The output is photoreal — your face, your features, your skin and hair, dressed in the qipao and lit by lantern-warm light, the gold brocade legible and the lanterns soft behind you. It borrows the garment, the festival's warm light and the register of a New Year portrait shoot; it does not turn you into a cartoon, an illustration, or a costume sticker pasted over a photo.

How to photograph yourself for Lunar New Year portraits

Good input, good portrait.

1. Soft, even lightFace a window with indirect daylight on you. Skip the overhead bulb and hard noon sun — both flatten the face and fight the warm lantern modelling the pack is built around.
2. Front or three-quarter, at eye levelHold the camera level with your eyes. No selfie up-angle, no looking down — the festive register wants you square to the lens.
3. Plain wall behind youLet the pack build the lantern courtyard, the fai-chun wall and the plum-blossom branches. A clean backdrop sends the whole likeness budget to your face.
4. Hair off the jawline if you canThe mandarin collar and the line of the neck are half the look. Hair pulled back lets the pack render the collar cleanly instead of inventing what it can't see.
5. Skip the heavy filterBeauty filters and aggressive retouching confuse the likeness. A plain, unfiltered photo gives the pack the real you to dress in red and gold.

Frequently asked questions

Is this a real Chinese New Year look or a costume filter?

It's built to read as a genuine festive portrait — real red silk with its satin sheen, raised gold brocade, a mandarin collar and frog clasps, lit by lantern-warm light with fai-chun couplets and plum blossom behind. It borrows the cut and register of a New Year portrait shoot; it doesn't claim to copy one designer's piece.

How is this different from the Qipao pack?

The Qipao pack is a year-round qipao shoot — three registers from a garden pavilion to neon Shanghai, with no festival framing. This one is Lunar New Year specifically: the same red silk, but staged in lantern-courtyard, fai-chun and plum-blossom light for the Spring Festival. Want the dress for any occasion, take Qipao; want New Year, take this.

Does this work for Tet or Seollal?

Honestly, only loosely. The looks here are Chinese — a red qipao, fai-chun couplets, lantern courtyards. Tet has its own ao dai and Seollal its hanbok, and this pack does not render those. If the red-and-gold Chinese New Year register is what you want, it fits; if you specifically want an ao dai or a hanbok, it's the wrong pack.

Can I choose the colours?

You get all nine, and the three looks span the reds women actually wear for the New Year — lacquer red and gold, vivid scarlet, prosperity-red with blossom-pink. Rather than picking one and hoping, you see the whole spread and decide what suits you.

Can I use these as a New Year greeting, profile picture, or print?

Yes. The portraits are yours to post, print, and send — the New Year card, the WeChat or WhatsApp greeting, the Instagram status, the family group chat. Delivered at a resolution that holds up in print.

Will the photos look like me?

Every photo looks like you, well photographed. If one is nearly right, say what to change, in your own words.

Do I have to write a prompt?

No. There is nothing to write: you pick a pack, and it is ready in seconds.

How many photos of myself do I add?

Between six and twenty, from different days and in different light, with your face clear. We check each one when you add it.

What happens to the photos I add?

They are used only to create your model, on our own servers in the European Union. They are not shared and not sold.

When the Lunar New Year pack fits

• A Lunar New Year card or red-packet greeting for WhatsApp and WeChat — your festive portrait ready before the reunion dinner.
• A festive profile picture for Instagram, Xiaohongshu, or your status, in a qipao you didn't have to rent.
• Trying Spring Festival colourways — lacquer red, scarlet, prosperity gold — before the family reunion.
• The family-reunion outfit, pictured before the fifteen days of meals begin.
• Diaspora Lunar New Year, picturing the festival from a flat in London, San Francisco, or Sydney.
• A gift for the mother, grandmother, or friend who cooks every reunion dinner but is never in the photo.
• A Chinese-zodiac-year keepsake, the red qipao staged for the turn of the year.
• The group-chat New Year portrait, when the real studio is booked solid in the busiest week of the year.
• A festive look to send relatives back home, in red and gold without the tailor.
• Trying the three registers — lantern courtyard, clean editorial, blossom-and-gold — before deciding which one is you.

About narcis

Most AI photo tools put every pose, job, era, and style in one giant catalog. The photos all look like every other AI photo on the internet — a glaze over a stock face. Narcis goes the other way. One job: photos of you that look like photographs. You add at least 6 photos of yourself, and we create your AI model from them. Your photos are ready in a few hours, and we email you when they are. Then this pack and every other pack on Narcis can be made with your face. Each pack is curated against real references — paintings, photographers, places — and tested on real faces before it goes live. Built and run by one small team, on our own servers.