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Portraits are a different job
This page never looks for a face. That is a design decision, and it is the reason a tap on a cheek behaves the way it does.
What happens if you tap a cheek
The disc is filled from the ring of picture around it, exactly as it would be on a sky. On an even stretch of cheek that is often fine, because an even stretch of cheek is a smooth field and a smooth field is what this method is best at.
It stops being fine the moment the disc touches a feature. A nostril, a lash line, the corner of a mouth, the line where a jaw meets a neck: each of those is a hard structure, and a disc filled by averaging turns hard structure into a smear. The seam shows it immediately, which is the one mercy of the arrangement.
What a face-aware tool would do, and this one does not
Work on a person starts by locating the person. A tool that knows where the eyes are can treat the area under them differently from the area beside them; it can leave pores while removing a mark; it can find both pupils and correct them together. All of that follows from the detection step, and none of it is available to a program that only knows about a disc.
This page has no detection step. You point; it fills, lifts, clears red or smooths, and each of those is a placed record you can remove. It does not reshape a jaw, slim a face, whiten teeth, apply makeup or lighten skin, and none of those is planned. The portrait jobs it does do have their own pages: Photo blemish remover, Remove red eye, Smooth skin and the Selfie editor.
The guess this page does make
When a large share of a coarse sample of the frame falls into the colour range that faces usually occupy, a note in the Fix panel points at the portrait-friendly parts of this page — Spot, Red-eye, and Detail's skin-tone smoothing — and says that reshaping and makeup are not part of this tool. That is a count of colours, not a detector, and it is happy to be fooled by a close-up of sand or a wooden floor. The same count is what the skin-tone smoothing and the profile crop shapes use, and the panel says so beside them.
It errs towards saying nothing. A suggestion that fires on every photograph of a beach is worse than one that misses half the portraits it should have caught, because the second kind is ignored and the first kind is resented.
Answers
This is a portrait. What can I do to it here?
Tap a blemish with Spot, tap each red pupil with Red-eye, drag a Heal stroke along a stray hair, and use Detail → Smooth on skin tones with the strength you choose. Photo blemish remover, Remove red eye and Smooth skin open with those already set. What this page never does is find the face for you, reshape it, whiten teeth, apply makeup or lighten skin.
There is one speck on a cheek and nothing else wrong.
A single small mark on an even patch of a cheek is inside what a disc can do. The failure starts where skin stops being even: a nostril, a lash line, the corner of a mouth.
How does the page decide a photograph holds a face?
It counts how much of a coarse sample of the frame falls in the colour range faces usually occupy. That is a guess from colour, not a detector, and it is wrong in both directions often enough that the suggestion it produces is only ever a suggestion.
