What makes a fake smile different from real one?
In: 63
Humans are extraordinarily good at picking up very minute changes in facial expressions. Most of it happens unconsciously, that is to say automatically. Same kind of thing happens when you display emotions on your face. Tiny tiny muscles arrange the skin bits in very particular order to display an emotion, say a happy smile face. Im sure both of these things can be practiced to a point, but mostly it is all autonomous.
Fake smile is someone putting a smile-mask on top of some other emotion and it looks different because your brain does the brain-work automatically and the smile seems off.
The eyes are key. Does the smile reach their eyes or no?
You’re in a plane. You watch the pilot do their pre-flight checks then take off. They don’t even have to think about it. Now you try to imitate them. You’ll get the order wrong and almost always forget to do things. But you make it off the ground so you think, “I can seem like a pilot now.” And to anyone not paying attention to what you do in the cockpit, you would. So, you don’t bother getting better.
That is the difference between a fake smile and a real one. Your body knows exactly how to smile, there’s no effort required. But *you* only *think* you know how to smile. There’s dozens of muscles in the face and a genuine smile activates a large portion of these muscles. A person pretending to smile is typically only bothering to activate a couple of the muscles that lift the corners of the mouth. They think, “That looks like a smile and it’s worked before.” But if someone is paying attention, they’ll notice the subtle differences. Usually, it’s the muscles in the eyes that people forget when they fake a smile, but there are others in the face as well.
EDIT: In a real smile, there’s a slight curl to the lips that most fake smiles neglect. The eyes squint a little bit. Not the eyelids, the muscles around the eyes. The nostrils also flair a little. The dimples are more pronounced. They’re slight differences that add up to a large one.
Lookie here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile)
The article describes the difference in simple words. Look for “Duchenne smile” and “Pan Am smile”.
Duchenne smile is the real one, Pan Am smile is the fake one.
OK Billy, so you know how you have real boo boos that hurt and fake boo boos that don’t hurt but you act like they do so that you can skip school, stay at home, watch your favorite cartoons and eat your favorite Mac and cheese? Yeah, it’s exactly like that… /s
> This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry… You know this smile—the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement—the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee.
— David Foster Wallace, [“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10162072-this-is-related-to-the-phenomenon-of-the-professional-smile)
When people show actual emotions, like when smiling, your face does lots of involuntary movements.
People are extremely good at facial recognition. We can spot extremely subtle things in a persons face that makes things feel “off”.
Now, when you ask someone to fake a smile, they’ll probably do several things. They will make their mouth into a smile shape. They may even crease their eyes. Is that the sum list of components that make a convincing smile? Well, maybe not. Peoples ears move, skin stretches, your cheeks move, your nasal openings dilate, your lip contorts along with the smile shape. And then there is the temporal aspect. Obviously a snap shot is fine, but a smile is an event, and happens over several seconds, if you’re trying to fake a smile, you need to nail every second. And then there is context. You need to also give a socially acceptable fake smile.
Fail any of these checks, and people will be able to spot a fake smile. This is however, a learned skill. Lots of people learn how to fake a smile. And lots of people get very good at it.
Most of the time it’s the eyes
A real smile involves a lot of muscles in your face
A fake smile is just your mouth showing the teeth
There are actually some smile muscles that you can’t control just by thinking about it.
#ELI5 with an example
My mother suffered a stroke, and this led to some minor facial paralysis.
The doctor wanted to show us that the paralysis didn’t mean those muscles *couldn’t* work, it just meant that my mother couldn’t *control* the muscles any longer.
The doctor asked my mother to smile.
My mother tried to smile, tried to make those muscles on her face move. She kind of succeeded, but because of the paralysis, the voluntary smile looked wrong.
But then he told my mother she was so lovely she could have been a model …
And my mother blushed, and SMILED FOR REAL. Those muscles *she couldn’t consciously control*, were working to produce a real smile, *involuntarily*.
THAT is the reason why you can tell a fake smile from a real one.
The muscles you control, are part of a smile. But there are other muscles you cannot control, that will work without you trying to do anything.
I’ve always noticed that real smiles involve the involuntary contraction of the muscles above the mouth (in the cheeks) creating a smile. When someone fake smiles, the muscles below their mouth contract (consciously) making something that is a smile “on paper” but you instinctively know it wasn’t an organic/genuine emotion.
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