How to Smile

Smiling is good. Evolutionarily, we want to smile. It helps us to be accepted. Researchers say that an openmouthed, sincere smile is visible from farther away than a frown; when you're smiling, you'll be recognized as having a smile at a great distance, even in a crowd. We feel better when we see it. And we feel better when we do it. In a 1988 study, German researchers, as they described it, "had subjects hold a pen in their mouth in a way that either inhibited or facilitated the muscles typically associated with smiling." When the subjects were shown cartoons, the humor responses were more intense in those who were already smiling than in those who were not.

But Smiling Is Hard

Although it's one of the most instinctive things we do (babies smile, blind people who have never seen a smile, smile), it's difficult to do on command. Someone wants to take your picture or you're introduced to a stranger or your neighbor sticks a baby picture in your face. You try and slap one on, maybe show some tooth. It looks either fake, lame, or scary.

A Little Anatomy

Any time you smile, you contract the zygomatic major, the muscle that runs from the corner of the mouth to the top of your jaw. A smile using the zygomatic major is easy. It's what we use to deliver a fake smile. The customer-service rep smiles like that. You're smiling like that in your driver's-license photo. Ryan Seacrest is smiling like that right now. It's a manufactured smile. You're not lighting up the room.

Then There's the Smile

The kind of smile you appreciate in your wife or girlfriend or a particularly kind-looking stranger. Because it's hard to do without meaning it. The "Duchenne smile" (after a French neurologist who studied the muscles of the face in the mid-nineteenth century) involves both the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi, the muscles surrounding the eyes, the ones that make crow's-feet. It's not just adding a squint to a smile — a squint involves the inner parts of the eye muscles and is easy to do. It's the outer parts of these muscles you want, and you have to be happy to activate them. When the orbicularis oculi get involved, the smile becomes forceful. You light up.

It's a Powerful Thing

So long as you can do it. For photos, you can force it easily enough: Just smile about 20 percent more than you think you should. Get it right up there between "glad to be here" and "rapturous to be here." And show your teeth. The top row. Only old men, newscasters, and six-year-olds show the bottom row. The key is smiling wide. Look in the mirror and make a smile so that you're showing the middle six teeth on the top row. Now really smile — wide enough so that your side teeth show. Now, smile even wider than that. You will feel ridiculous, but you will end up looking happy. That's the other thing. Think happy.

Happy Works

If you need something to smile about, think of your girlfriend or your dog or a bunch of Germans holding pens in their teeth and watching cartoons. It'll show.