High up in the hierarchy of things that are putting off is the fake smile and manufactured laugh. It is certainly worse than the committal non-smile, or even the deadpan look, since its fakeness is far more obvious to most onlookers than believed by the laugh-angey (there is good reason why in Hindi this means ‘loafer‘), and because it signals exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to convey: friendliness. To treat this facial-cerebral mismatch, and to better the quality of one’s smile or laugh, enter the smile tutor, and where else but in ‘form is content’ Japan. Smile coaches are back spreading the right kind of socially accepted joy after the pandemic masked faces, and, with them, smiles. This is a society that understands the importance of connecting people to their cheek and mouth muscles in a workplace, or to make oneself more attractive in the mating arena.
The smile, lest it be laughed off, has its origins in the ‘fear grin’ of apes who use barely clenched teeth to ‘tell’ predators they are harmless, or to submit to more dominant group members. 30 million years of evolution and practice later, the Big Ape – us, humans – turned it into an even more ‘friendly’ smile, adding the laugh, smirk, grin, beam and guffaw in the face’s non-verbal arsenal. Now, do you get why getting it right beyond sending a ‘smiley’ emoji is so important?
