What to do
- Lift your mouth corners a little: a smile that is there without showing much.
- Keep your lips closed.
- Leave your brows and eyes at rest.
- Keep your chin level, within 5°.
- Look into the lens.
Where it comes from
- Leonardo da Vinci painted the portrait of Lisa Gherardini between 1503 and 1519; it hangs in the Louvre (Mona Lisa, Musée du Louvre).
- Faint as the smile is, viewers in one study called the original happy in nearly every trial (Liaci et al. 2017).
Practise it live
Open How I Land and choose “Mona Lisa” 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.