It took me roughly 1,500 selfies during my trip to Peru to get my easy, breezy, and convincing selfie smile down. Second, it’s hard to get a real smile (with teeth!) right without looking like a goober. “First, it avoids crazy eyes - not all of us can smize like Tyra. Spoiler: A lot of the reasons are sort of dark! They don’t know how to make any other faces As it turns out, there are a lot of reasons, from a desire to hide one’s “jacked-up teeth” to an attempt to erase all the sadness from one’s face and create a facsimile of happiness. To find out why so many youngish men who are not former teen Vine stars are making this face, I asked a variety of them. “The tightening of the face muscles you have to do to make the face in question here also comes with, like, a 5 percent smirk, almost a hint of a hint of a smirk.” - Richard Johnson So he’s just trying to emphasize that he doesn’t want to do it.” He’s like, ‘Ah, I gotta take this picture.’ When his eyebrows are raised, that shows emphasis on a certain point. When I showed her a photo of professionally annoying 20-year-old social media phenom Nash Grier making the face, Brown described it: “He’s not showing emotion like he really wants to be there. It makes sense, then, that men might be more likely to make a face that screams, “I am uncomfortable!” while participating in an act that is often coded as feminine. They’re doing it because they have to, like they’re forced into it,” she told me over the phone recently. “There’s no smile - their eyes are kind of wide. Which, same!Īccording to body language expert Traci Brown, what the face is actually broadcasting is that the person doesn’t really want to be taking the photo in the first place. The eyes, too, often have a certain deadness about them. The bewilderment of the raised eyebrows is offset by a tautness in the mouth that reads as disappointment. Today, though, I think the face communicates a certain world-weariness that I find incredibly relatable. To me, it always recalled the fraudulent “who, me?” poses of early 2000s pop-punk lead singers, an expression of nice-guyness reserved for dudes who would later ask you for nudes via MySpace. Every time I’d see a crush doing it on Instagram (a lot!) I would experience a deep, full-bodied pang of cringiness. It is a face that expresses this uncertainty - it is both happy and sad, surprised and indifferent, hopeful and cynical, studied and spontaneous.Īnd for a very long time, I despised it. Though I have surely done it at one point or another, it is especially prevalent among guys who are somewhere in between teenagehood and middle age, the period of life most fraught with questions and doubts about one’s place in the world. “This is a face that says, ‘I’m kind of fun!’ but still reminds you, the viewer, ‘I am a tough, serious dude.” -Alex Kirshner It is this: raised eyebrows, and tightened lips. But all along, there has been a single face that’s gone entirely unnoticed for the past decade-plus of its existence. Nearly all of said selfie crazes are performed by women, and we rarely discuss the ones percolating among men. Since the dawn of duckface in the mid-2000s - the act of pursing one’s lips and pushing them forward as if leaning in for a particularly theatrical kiss - we’ve replaced it with “sparrow face,” “migraine face,” belfies, T-rex hands, Bambi-ing, and that weird thing where teens cover their entire face with one hand, thus eliminating the purpose of a selfie in the first place. And in that span of time, we’ve had to innovate. If you’ve ever experienced the misfortune of taking a photo of yourself that will end up on the internet, you have contemplated the weight of the following question: How should I move the muscles in my face to communicate my identity in the most socially correct way possible?įor many of us, the answer is clear: a smile, with teeth! And yet thanks to the proliferation of social media, dating apps, and technology that makes taking selfies infuriatingly addicting (curse you, portrait mode), human beings are now forced to pose for more photos than at any other point in history.
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