Why Our Smiles Look Fake in Pictures

The horror movie "Smile" has been racking it up at the box office, which got me thinking about how many people hate smiles. I’m not talking about terrifying psychopath smiles or creepy clown smiles. Many people hate their own smiles.

Have you ever looked at pictures of yourself and thought, “My smile always looks fake”?

It looks like a fake smile because it is a fake smile. And it took getting a degree in neuroscience for me to understand why. A real smile doesn’t start from your face—it starts from your brain’s emotional circuitry.

Don't get too mad at yourself for having a fake smile. Blame the 19th-century French doctor Guillaume Duchenne. Of course, it's easy to blame the French for our unhappiness, look no further than existentialism (that's a whole other topic). But what Duchenne discovered is that there are really two types of smiles.

First, there are genuine smiles that arise from feelings of happiness and joy. While the most obvious feature of these is the corners of your mouth turned upwards, they don't just affect your mouth. They also cause your brain to contract a particular muscle around the eye called the orbicularis oculi, which causes the edges of your eyes to wrinkle. These are called Duchenne smiles.

Interestingly one very recent study (Okazaki, 2021) found that our faces (really our brains) have adapted to all the mask-wearing, and when our mouths are covered the eye muscles get more involved to better demonstrate our smiles.

The second type (non-Duchenne smiles) are simply movements of your mouth. The eyes don’t get involved. We often do this out of politeness or when someone takes our picture and tells us to “smile” or to “say ‘cheese.’” As I said, your smile looks fake because it is fake.

But even though wrinkling around the eyes is part of a natural smile, some people don’t like the appearance of these wrinkles and choose to eliminate them by injecting a neurotoxin to paralyze particular facial muscles... a.k.a. Botox. Be careful of this approach though. One study (Etcoff, 2021) found that after Botox, “patients looked younger, although not more attractive.” Even if they’re accompanied by a little wrinkling around your eyes, we find genuine smiles more attractive.

How can you utilize this information to be more photogenic? Stop focusing on the movements of your mouth, and instead start by changing your brain's emotional activity. Try looking for genuine joy or humor in the situation.

Don’t force yourself to smile. Allow yourself to smile. Think about the fun of the people you’re with or the event you’re at. Laugh at the photographer as they futz with the camera. Or laugh at yourself and the absurdity of how hard it is to look natural.

Changing your emotions changes your brain. And when the emotions are real your smile won’t be fake.

Facebook/LinkedIn image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock