THE MAGIC OF SMILES AND LAUGHTER
? What makes this one of the world's most irresistible icon
Bob gazed across the room and locked eyes with an attractive brunette. She seemed to smile at him and, not being slow on the uptake, he swiftly crossed the room and began a conversation with her. She didn't seem to talk much but she was still smiling at him so he persisted. One of his female friends sauntered past and whispered, 'Forget it Bob...she thinks you're a jerk.' He was stunned. But she was still smiling at him! As with most men, Bob didn't understand the negative significance of the tight-lipped, no-teeth-visible female smile.
Children were often told by their grandmothers to 'put on a happy face', 'wear a big smile' and 'show your pearly 'whites' when meeting someone new because Grandma knew, on an intuitive level, it would produce a positive reaction in others. The first recorded scientific studies into smiling were in the
The Magic of Smiles and Laughter
early part of the nineteenth century when French scientist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne used electrodiagnostics and electrical stimulation to distinguish between the smile of real enjoyrnent and other kinds of smiling. He analysed the heads of people executed by guillotine to study how the face muscles worked. He pulled face muscles from many different angles to catalogue and record which muscles caused which smiles. He discovered that smiles are controlled by two sets of muscles: the zygomatic major muscles, which run down the side of the face and connect to the corners of the mouth and the orbicularis oculi, which pull the eyes back. The zygomatic majors pull the mouth back to expose the teeth and enlarge the cheeks, while the orbicularis oculi make the eyes narrow and cause 'crow's feet'. These muscles are important to understand because the zygomatic majors are consciously controlled - in other words, they are used to produce false smiles of fake enjoyment to try to appear friendly or subordinate. The orbicularis oculi at the eyes act independently and reveal the true feelings of a genuine smile. So the first place to check the sincerity of a smile is to look for wrinkle lines beside the eyes.
A natural smile produces characteristic wrinkles around the eyes - insincere people smile only with their mouth.
In the enjoyment smile, not only are the lip corners pulled up, but the muscles around the eyes are contracted, while nonenjoyment smiles involve just the smiling lips.
The Definitive Book of Body Language
It has been superseded in younger generations by De Slappe Vaatdoek, or Sloppy Dishcloth. This needs no further explanation
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