What makes a fake smile different from real one?
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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.
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