In a real smile, when a person is actually experiencing happiness… barring some kind of facial paralysis or nerve damage or something:
A person’s eyes will narrow, from the bottom of the eye, their eyebrows move downward, their cheeks will shift upward, and if they’re roughly older than 25ish, they’ll get crows feet, or wrinkles in the corners of their eyes.
In a fake smile, the eyes and cheeks basically don’t change at all, or at least significantly less.
Any time anyone is trying to convince you to do something and is giving you a fake smile, they are consciously and actively faking it, knowingly trying to manipulate you.
This is why a whooole bunch of stock footage and commercials with people smiling just feels wrong.
You have to actually be a fairly decent actor to do a genuine smile on command, an even more talented actor to do so repeatedly for an hour + of multiple takes.
99% of ‘body language’ expert stuff is bullshit.
Here’s one that isn’t.
Real, genuine smile, vs fake, forced smile.
In a real smile, when a person is actually experiencing happiness… barring some kind of facial paralysis or nerve damage or something:
A person’s eyes will narrow, from the bottom of the eye, their eyebrows move downward, their cheeks will shift upward, and if they’re roughly older than 25ish, they’ll get crows feet, or wrinkles in the corners of their eyes.
In a fake smile, the eyes and cheeks basically don’t change at all, or at least significantly less.
Left: Genuine, Right: Fake.
Also, genuine smiles fade gradually, fake smiles disappear immediately.
Any time anyone is trying to convince you to do something and is giving you a fake smile, they are consciously and actively faking it, knowingly trying to manipulate you.
This is why a whooole bunch of stock footage and commercials with people smiling just feels wrong.
You have to actually be a fairly decent actor to do a genuine smile on command, an even more talented actor to do so repeatedly for an hour + of multiple takes.