What to do
- Lift your upper lids a little, so your eyes are 4 to 15% wider than at rest. Not more: wide eyes read as fear.
- Keep your mouth corners level, not drooping.
- Keep your chin level, within 5° up or down.
- Look at their eyes for about 3 seconds at a time, then glance to the side, never down.
Be in the look when your eyes meet theirs: people settle on a face within about a tenth of a second (Willis & Todorov 2006; Todorov, Pakrashi & Oosterhof 2009).
Practise it live
Open How I Land and choose “alert” after “Be seen as”. Your camera shows your face with this look drawn on it, and one instruction at a time tells you what to move. When it fits, hold it for five seconds to remember the position.
Free. Nothing is recorded, stored or sent.
Why it reads this way
- Alertness is read as the opposite of tiredness. After a night without sleep, raters scored hanging eyelids and drooping mouth corners higher, and both tracked how tired the person looked (Sundelin et al. 2013). A sleepier look made others less willing to spend time with the person (Sundelin et al. 2017).
- Widened eyes read as fear and awe, so the app stops at 15% (Lee & Anderson 2017).
- More open upper lids also raised perceived intelligence (Talamas et al. 2016).
- A lowered head with lowered eyes reads as submissive and sad, so the head stays level (Mignault & Chaudhuri 2003).
- About 3 seconds of eye contact at a time is what viewers found most comfortable (Binetti et al. 2016), and a gaze that returns to the viewer raised likeability (Mason, Tatkow & Macrae 2005).
In the app, “Why” shows the target numbers and how each was built, with its sources.
Where the people you meet are from
- Japan and South Korea: eye contact about 2 seconds at a time, aimed softly between the eyes. Japanese raters judged a held, direct gaze in person as angrier and less approachable than Finnish raters did (Akechi et al. 2013), and Japanese adults in conversation look at the eye region and between the eyes (Haensel et al. 2020).
- Nothing else changes by region: the two axes the looks rest on, warmth and dominance, were found again in all 11 world regions tested (Jones et al. 2021).
Good for
Long meetings, video calls, the day after a short night.
Guides
How to look less tired, How to come across on a video call. All guides.
Other looks
Approachable, happy, open, confident, competent, trustworthy, calm, mysterious, intimidating. All ten on one page.