Can people I know find my OnlyFans or recognise me if I hide my face?
Maybe. Hiding your face helps. A stage name helps. Keeping the work away from your everyday social accounts helps too. What none of those things gives you is invisibility.
People who already know you can recognise a surprising amount without seeing a face. Tattoos, jewellery, a familiar bedroom, hair, voice, a birthmark, the way you move, even clothes you wear all the time can give somebody enough clues. Then there is the basic contradiction of creator work: you want strangers to find you while hoping people you know never do. Those two goals can coexist, but they pull in opposite directions.
A stage name is still useful. It creates distance between your everyday identity and the name attached to the work. Somebody casually Googling your legal name is less likely to fall straight onto your content. But if an old boyfriend or classmate actually sees the material and recognises you, the stage name does not change what they saw.
The same goes for faceless content. You can keep your face out of an OnlyFans account or a porn scene, and for many people that cuts the recognition risk dramatically. But it is worth thinking beyond the face. Voice, tattoos, mirrors, reflections, backgrounds and links between accounts can matter just as much.
There is also a private side that viewers normally never need to see. Platforms, producers and payment providers may need your real identity for age verification, contracts or payments. That does not mean the public needs it. I treat legal identity and public identity as two separate things, and I think anybody considering this work should ask who sees which one.
If you are running your own account, privacy becomes part of the marketing job. You might use a separate email, separate public accounts and a stage name, but you still need some route that brings buyers to you. Search, creator communities, collaborations, social media, paid promotion, whatever. The more aggressively you try to become visible, the more opportunities there are for the work and your everyday life to cross paths.
A booked production works differently because you do not need to create the audience yourself. You can be cast for a project with no followers at all. The production handles the cameras, edit and distribution. That removes a lot of the daily exposure that comes from promoting yourself, but it makes the publication agreement more important because somebody else controls the finished release.
Before I film somebody, I want the practical questions to be boringly clear. Is her face visible? Is her voice used? What stage name appears? Can promotional stills be made? Where can the material be published? What private information stays private? Those are easier questions to answer before a camera comes out than afterwards.
Some people will decide that a faceless account or faceless shoot gives them enough separation. Others will decide that any realistic chance of recognition is too much. Both are sensible answers. The mistake is treating "faceless" and "anonymous" as the same word.