Face anonymization techniques are described that overcome conventional challenges to generate an anonymized face. In one example, a digital object editing system is configured to generate an anonymized face based on a target face and a reference face. As part of this, the digital object editing system employs an encoder as part of machine learning to extract a target encoding of the target face image and a reference encoding of the reference face. The digital object editing system then generates a mixed encoding from the target and reference encodings. The mixed encoding is employed by a machine-learning model of the digital object editing system to generate a mixed face. An object replacement module is used by the digital object editing system to replace the target face in the target digital image with the mixed face.