Smile with your eyes!

If you’ve had a session with me before, I would’ve asked you to smile with your eyes. Why with your eyes? And how do you do that?!  This is the one part that doesn’t lie.  You can’t fake a smile if you’re smiling with your eyes, and that portrays true happiness.

 But let’s go back - where does that smile come from?  It starts with sensory stimulation.  You see, hear or feel something that makes you happy.  You see your partner walking over to you, or you hear your favorite song on the radio. This emotional data gets funnelled into the brain and gets processed, resulting in the zygomatic major, a muscle which resides in the cheek, to tug the lips upwards and the orbicularis oculi, which encircles the eye socket, to squeeze the outside corners into the shape of a crow’s foot. You smile… This involuntary action is short and sweet, but carries more power that you can imagine.

Other muscles can be used to simulate the smile, but only the combination of the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi produces a genuine expression of positive emotion. Psychologists calls this the “Duchenne smile” after French anatomist Guillaume Duchenne, who studied emotional expression by stimulating various facial muscles with electrical currents.  In his study he found that the zygomatic major can be stimulated into action, but not the orbicularis oculi, making this the one dead giveaway of a fake smile.  This muscle can only be actioned by the brain, i.e. your thoughts and memories.  This is why “Smile with your eyes” will usually be followed by “Think of something that makes you happy.”

But smiling doesn’t only have the power to give you a good portrait, but many studies have shown the health benefits of smiling.  It also has social benefits, like making you more likable, more competent and trustworthy.  Smiling is contagious, so you’re bound to boost your own mood as well as someone else’s in the room.

So next time '“… you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours” -  Dolly Parton.