Improved Lives

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But not just any kind of smile, it has to be a slow smile.

Slow Smiles over Quick Smiles

In this study, participants were asked to judge smiles shown to them on a computer screen. Overall, it was found that the smiles that formed slowly (0.5 seconds) were more attractive, trustworthy, and authentic than smiles that formed more quickly (0.1 seconds).

So the best kind of smile is a slow smile.

Smiling for Long Term Attractiveness

This study is really fascinating I think, and it’s something that everyone, but especially women, should know about. It was found that beautiful women with unagreeable, anti-social personalities actually become uglier over time, whereas unattractive women with very social, extroverted personalities actually become more attractive as they got older.

Men, on the other hand, are the opposite of women. How attractive a man is determines his future personality. So attractive men will have more sociable, agreeable personalities in the future and unattractive men will be less sociable and agreeable in the future.

The bottom line for anyone looking for a long term partner:

• For men: make sociability and extroversion priorities when looking for dates, because these women will generally age well, like a good wine.
• For women: as vain as it sounds, attractive men will generally have better personalities as they age, so look for attractive men to date.

Remember, these are not hard rules, but general guidelines. There are plenty of women and men out there who will prove these generalizations wrong, so use common sense.

Allocate Smiles Properly

Think of smiles as a social commodity. The more smiles you throw out in to the world, the less they’re worth. One finding of the first study was that the women’s smiles were, overall, judged to be less authentic than men’s smiles.

The researchers speculated that this is because women tend to smile more in day to day life. What that means is the smiles of the women in the study were seen as ‘business as usual’ and less as a source of information on how attractive or trustworthy they were.

This doesn’t mean you should smile less, but rather you should dole out more smiles to the people who matter and less smiles to strangers.

The bottom line from all this research is that smiles are powerful. We tend to look for big, complicated ways to improve our lives but it doesn’t have to be big and complicated, it can be as easy as a smile.

Further Reading:
- A Slow Smile Attracts
- A Reason to Smile