What to do
- Tip your chin down about 15°, anywhere from 12° to 20°.
- Lower your brows.
- Look up into the lens from under them.
- No smile, lips closed.
Where it comes from
- In the Kubrick stare the actor looks out from under the brow line, the head tilted toward the camera, as in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980) (Kubrick stare, Wikipedia).
- Why it unsettles: a head tipped down only 10° already made the same face read as more dominant, because the tilt makes the brows look lowered and V-shaped (Witkower & Tracy 2019).
Practise it live
Open How I Land and choose “Kubrick stare” under “Celebrity look”. Your camera shows your face with the look drawn on it, and one instruction at a time tells you what to move. When it fits, hold it for five seconds.
Free. Nothing is recorded, stored or sent.
It copies a famous face; it is not a first-impression benchmark. No one named here made or endorsed the app.