Great Smiles from a great show!

Here are some highlights from the Smile competition from Colgate Max White One’s Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model.

See what you think!

Pan American Airlines, better known as Pan Am, were once the international carrier for America, started in 1920 sadly  collapsed in 1991. The airline hostesses for Pan Am were famous for their ‘Pan-Am Smile’.

I must confess this was the first I’d heard of such a thing, it’s described as a ‘fake smile that is flashed to every jetsetter’ it has also been described as the ‘botox smile’ you can read about it here on wikipedia. So what?

A Smile without empathy is hardly a smile at all. Surely a fake smile that has no meaning means less than no smile at all, my question is how do you feel if you know someone flashes a fake smile at you? Well interestingly I came across an article written in The Sunday Times Newspaper  by John Harlow, thankfully you don’t need to have a subscription to read his article, you can read it here.

In the article he discusses a study by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California in Berkeley in the difference between American and British smiles.

He found that while the British would smile by pulling their lips back and upwards and exposing the lower teeth, Americans are more likely simply to part their lips and stretch the corners of their mouths.

The difference was so distinct that he was able  to pick out Britons from Americans from close-cropped pictures of their smiles alone, with an accuracy of more than 90%.

Keltner found the British were also more likely to raise their cheeks when they smile, showing the crow’s feet at the corners of the eyes. This produces a more sincere, hard-to-fake smile.

The most common British smile — restrained but dignified — is called the Duchenne smile after Guillaume Duchenne, a 19th century French doctor who analysed facial expressions.

Keltner has nicknamed it the “Prince Charles”, as he believes the Prince of Wales has the typical British smile.

By contrast, Keltner found most Americans had the far less expressive smiles similar to the  “Pan-Am smile”.

In the article Keltner describes Tim Henman’s smile as ‘genuine, coy and flirtatious’ and Tony Blair’s ‘had retained many British characteristics’ likewise George bush’s smile was described as cynical rather than pleasurable’

The genuineness of a good British smile is all in the eyes — Keltner has found that only 5% of people can fake a smile that uses this muscle.

Other research has shown that women smile more than men in public, but stop smiling in private.

The power behind the smile may also be more potent than anybody has previously realised: Keltner recently released a study of photographs of women in college yearbooks dating back to the 1960s in which he separated the Duchenne smilers from the artfully posed. Researchers then tracked the women down and found that those who had smiled most happily at college overwhelmingly tended to have had the happiest lives since they had graduated.

Being a scientist, this all does sound quite convenient and i must stress this all is from an article in The Sunday times so a touch of the sensationalism doesn’t go amiss.

I find it fascinating that we regularly have people asking for the ‘Hollywood smile’, yet after this the truest smiles remain to be British.