What to do
- Smile broadly, lips apart, so that your teeth show.
- Keep your chin level or a little up: anywhere from 5° down to 10° up.
- Lift your cheeks until your eyes narrow a little. This is a bonus: the app tells you when you reach it and does not require it.
- Hold the smile for 3 to 5 seconds.
- 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 “happy” 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
- Rated happiness rises from a straight face to a closed smile to a smile showing teeth (Otta, Abrosio & Hoshino 1996). Most smiles seen as amused had the mouth open; few polite ones did (Ambadar, Cohn & Reed 2009).
- Embarrassed smiles come with the head tipped down, amused ones with it tilted up (Ambadar, Cohn & Reed 2009).
- Lifted cheeks make a smile read as more genuine, more so in motion than in photos. They also show in many polite smiles, so the app counts them as a bonus (Gunnery & Ruben 2016; Ambadar, Cohn & Reed 2009; Messinger et al. 2012).
- Smiles seen as amused lasted about twice as long as polite ones (Ambadar, Cohn & Reed 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
- 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
Photos, greetings, good news.
Guides
Slight or broad? How to choose a smile, How to look good in photos: expression and angle, How to come across when you meet someone new. All guides.
Other looks
Approachable, open, confident, competent, trustworthy, calm, alert, mysterious, intimidating. All ten on one page.