Is there anything about your physical appearance or “presence” that inspires people to comment? Maybe you’re tall and people ask how tall you are, or you have curly hair that people like to compliment you on, or you have tattoos that people want to take a closer look at. Just curious.
Me, I have an exotic, hard-to-place look about me, so I have strangers approach me and ask what my ethnicity is. (I’m Jewish and British, but I’m often mistaken for Hispanic, Italian, or Middle Eastern.)
Apparently I look Eastern European/Slavic enough that babushkas living in Chicago will come up to me and start speaking to me in Polish or Russian or Ukrainian or whatever, then berate me for not understanding what they’re saying. Does that count?
Whaaat? I’ve had people start talking to me in Spanish, but I’ve never had someone make me feel bad for not understanding! If anything, they’re the ones who get embarrassed when I give them a strange look and say “What?”
I like to wear T-shirts and face masks that have foxes on them, and I’ve had a few people comment on them. The woman who administered my preliminary exam at the ophthalmologist’s office told me she thought the combination was cute. Which is what I’m going for.
People have complimented my blue eyes.
There have been several people, mostly women, who have commented on my ringtone when I get notifications and text messages, which is the Kimunnicator sound from Kim Possible. I think the two doctors who mentioned it were a little bit younger than I am. (I’m 40).
“Nice face mask, is that the Ukraine flag?”
Beard. It’s always the beard.
I have very curly hair that is often piled big on the top of my head. Whether it looks good or bad at the moment, it’s always noticeable. People comment on that.
I’m the blandest, most average looking guy at my age now you can imagine, so usually my appearance gives nothing away about me, though sometimes I wear nerdy t-shirts that may start a conversation at parties. But I have one strange memory of an encounter I had in my twenties in the 90s when I had very long hair and dressed like a hippie. I was in a department store and a nice very old lady asked me “Entschuldigung, wo finde ich denn die Kurzwaren?” (“Excuse me, where do I find the petty wares?”). I looked nothing like a store clerk, I didn’t even know what “petty wares” are. That was strange.
People are confused about my ancestry/ethnicity/nationality because I am South Asian, have a Portuguese last name, a very English sounding first name, and a very distinctive but very hard to place accent. People often guess that I am South African, I think because that is an English accent that they are least familiar with and there’s reputed to be every kind of mixed up ethnicity there.
My hair is long. Not freakishly so; I see people every day with hair longer than mine. But it’s the only comment-worthy part of my appearance.
I walk with crutches and people will very occasionally ask or comment about them. Mostly, they just stare.
More often, it’s the braids. It’s how I wear my hair most days- in some kind of (white girl) braids. And I get a lot of comments and discussion about them- people ask if I did it myself and tell me about how they wish they knew how to do it (Youtube!) or tell me they use to wear their hair that way when they were young. Crown braids or similar styles are especially popular (which is gratifying because they’re a pain in the butt to do).
Apparently I always look like I know where I am going, because almost every time I visit an unfamiliar city for any length of time, someone will ask me for directions - sometimes prefaced by ‘Do you speak English?’ if it’s not the common language.
Like some others in this thread, my looks make my ethnicity very hard to pin down. Turns out I’m just (half) Black 
I have a pretty large tattoo on my thigh that doesn’t get too much attention these days now that they’re commonplace but 25 years ago I got a lot of comments about it.
I am invisible now - it’s been that way for a few years and I am OK with it. I do not have any ink or attractive hair or unusual height - I am pretty average in every way.
These days I may get approached by a stranger when on a bike trip, when they usually ask “Where are you headed?” or “How far are you riding?”. I think the bike and bags and gear and such is an oddity in general so it makes a good ice-breaker. Other than that I exist in the unseen world.
I look like I work in whatever store I’m in.
When my beard was long, I’d routinely get people ‘jokingly’ calling me a terrorist or “Osama” or jihadist or something else equally stupid. I’d mostly ignore it, but I did say something to a few people either because they were doing so constantly it stopped being funny weeks ago or because they’d use one of those types of words and ‘Muslim’ in the same breath (ie you look like some kinda muslim terrorist). I’d annoyingly tell them that they can call me muslim or terrorist but it’s kinda racist to equate them.
Anyways, the beard is short now so the majority of the comments I get on it are about how gray it’s getting (just around my chin and I don’t have another gray hair anywhere else).
Same for me! But it’s usually within the first few days of arriving.
I am ugly and my mother dresses me funny. Well, ok, my mother only buys me sweaters once a year, and they are really fucking good looking sweaters, at least at first – if anyone dresses me funny, that would be me. And I do, and occasionally I get a comment on my “trendsetter” (as in normal people do not dress that way) attire. If asked why I dress that way, “one day, someone told me my fly was open again, and it annoyed me so badly that I decided I never wanted to hear that again”.
As for ugly, I used to be much prettier. So I am told.
I have a T-shirt from the railroad museum in Rosenberg, Texas. The back has The Hobo Code printed on it (something like this) and every time I wear it in public I can usually count on at least two people tapping me on the shoulder wanting to know all about it. Fun!
I am bald with a white beard. Just like my avatar (which my son made for me). When I first grew the beard on the cusp of 1965-66, people in the small town in southern NJ would gape and I think I nearly caused some auto accidents, but beards have become much more common since.
My blue-eyed blond son was once waiting for a bus in Boston and a woman came up to him and said, “You must be Irish.” He denied it and explained that on both sides he was pure Ashkenazi Jewish and, as far as he knew no ancestor of his had ever set foot in Ireland. She continued to insist he must be Irish and kept it up till the bus came.