What to do
- Smile so that it shows. A slight closed smile is enough.
- Keep your brows at their resting height or higher. Do not lower them.
- Keep your chin level, within 5° up or down.
- Let the smile build over half a second to a second, and fade over at least a second.
- 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 “approachable” 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
- Approachability is read mostly from the mouth. Across 1,000 everyday photos its strongest predictors were all mouth measures: the curve of the lower lip, the width of the mouth and lips apart (Vernon et al. 2014). Happy faces were rated the most approachable, angry ones the least (Willis, Palermo & Burke 2011).
- Lowered brows read as angry and dominant (Vernon et al. 2014; Witkower & Tracy 2019).
- A chin tipped 10° down cut trust ratings (Torrance et al. 2020), and a raised head reads as superior (Mignault & Chaudhuri 2003).
- In a mock job interview, a smile that built and faded slowly was rated higher than the same smile switched on fast, which did no better than no smile (Krumhuber et al. 2009).
- 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
- English-speaking countries: the app also asks for parted lips, a broader smile. European Americans rated broad, excited smiles as more outgoing and agreeable than calm ones, more than Hong Kong Chinese did (Tsai et al. 2019).
- China and Chinese-speaking regions: a calm smile does the job; the targets stay as they are (Tsai et al. 2019).
- 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
Meeting new people, networking, a first day, work that faces customers.
Guides
Resting face: why you look annoyed when you are not, How to look less intimidating, How to come across when you meet someone new. All guides.
Other looks
Happy, open, confident, competent, trustworthy, calm, alert, mysterious, intimidating. All ten on one page.