What to do
- Smile slightly, lips closed.
- Open your eyes fully: at their resting width or up to 10% wider.
- Keep your brows at their resting height or higher. Do not lower them.
- 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 “competent” 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
- Competence is read from warmth held in check. The same person with a broad smile was rated warmer but less competent than with a slight one (Wang et al. 2017; Li et al. 2021). Against no smile at all, smiling raises rated competence (Reis et al. 1990).
- More open upper lids raised perceived intelligence, independently of attractiveness (Talamas et al. 2016).
- Faces that merely resemble anger are judged less competent as well as less warm (Zebrowitz, Kikuchi & Fellous 2010).
- Level faces were rated best or equal as leaders; a chin down reads as dominant and a raised head as superior (Torrance et al. 2020; 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
- Germanic Europe and Southeast Asia: a more visible smile, lips still closed. There, smiling made faces look more intelligent (Krys et al. 2016).
- Japan and South Korea: a faint smile at most. There, smiling made faces look less intelligent (Krys et al. 2016).
- 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
Job interviews, client meetings, professional photos.
Guides
Your face in a job interview, How to come across on a video call, How to look good in photos: expression and angle. All guides.
Other looks
Approachable, happy, open, confident, trustworthy, calm, alert, mysterious, intimidating. All ten on one page.