I built facecalculators.com a free, privacy-first face shape detector that runs entirely in the browser. No uploads. No server. No account. All facial analysis happens locally via WebAssembly, and nothing biometric ever leaves the device. The core of it is Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker with the 478-point 3D model. Getting it working in a pure vanilla JavaScript environment, without a build tool, without React, and inside a WordPress theme, was not as straightforward as the docs make it look. This article documents every failure mode I hit and the exact solution that finally worked. If you are building anything with MediaPipe in the browser and not using a bundler, this will save you real hours. What the Docs Tell You vs. What Actually Works The official Google documentation shows two ways to load the library via CDN.…