What makes a smile?

Everyone loves a genuine, winning, confident smile. A smile can make your day, make everything feel all right again and put you in a brilliant mood. People who smile a lot are the people we all love to be around. But how does a smile really work?

 

A truly great smile — and by that we mean a happy, warm and genuine one — actually has a scientific name. It's called the "Duchenne smile," after the French researcher Guillaume Duchenne. This type of smile involves the movement of both the major muscle near the mouth (called the zygomaticus) and the muscles near the eyes (the orbicularis oculi).

 

It’s believed that the Duchenne smile is only produced as an involuntary response to genuine emotion, and that’s why it’s called the "genuine" smile. Because people use their eyes when they express this smile, it’s sometimes said that one can tell whether a smile is "real" by checking whether or not it "reaches the eyes."

 

The "Pan-American smile," on the other hand, is the "polite" or "business-like" smile that we may use to greet people, rather than to express emotion. This smile's name is derived from Pan-American Airlines, because it is the kind of smile that a flight attendant might give us when serving on a flight. The so-called Pan-American smile only uses the zygomaticus major muscle near the mouth and doesn't reach the eyes.

 

A warm and confident smile also comes with having great teeth, of course. Today advances in the dental world mean there are many things we can do to make our smiles perfect, from braces to tooth whitening, teeth capping and even dental jewellery if we so choose! So if we want to have a brilliant white smile, there are many, many choices!