We present a novel real-time face detail reconstruction method capable of recovering high quality geometry on consumer mobile devices. Our system firstly uses a morphable model and semantic segmentation of facial parts to achieve robust self-calibration. We then capture fine-scale surface details using a patch-based Shape from Shading (SfS) approach. We pre-compute the patch-wise constant Moore–Penrose inverse matrix of the resulting linear system to achieve real-time performance. Our method achieves high interactive frame-rates and experiments show that our new approach is capable of reconstructing high-fidelity geometry with corresponding results to off-line techniques. We illustrate this through comparisons with off-line and on-line related works, and include demonstrations of novel face detail shader effects processing.