What to do
- Do not smile. Close your lips and keep your mouth corners level.
- Leave your brows at rest.
- Narrow your eyes slightly: 5 to 14% narrower than at rest.
- Keep your chin level, within 5° up or down.
- Hold their eyes longer than is comfortable, past about 3 seconds, and break only to the side.
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 “mysterious” 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
- The app builds this look from a base principle: mystery is attention without information. The face shows it is engaged with them and gives them nothing to read.
- A smile at less than half strength already shifted how warmly a face was rated, so any smile gives it away (Hess, Blairy & Kleck 2000).
- Faint negative cues are read too: drooping corners as tired, lowered inner brows as angry, raised outer brows as surprised. So the face stays at rest (Sundelin et al. 2013; Knoll, Attkiss & Persing 2008).
- Widening and narrowing explain most of how eyes are read, from fear and awe when wide to scrutiny and suspicion when narrow. Kept slight, narrowing reads as scrutiny (Lee & Anderson 2017).
- Viewers found about 3 seconds of eye contact the most comfortable; the hold past that is the attention (Binetti et al. 2016).
In the app, “Why” shows the target numbers and how each was built, with its sources.
Where the people you meet are from
- Nothing in this look 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, a stage persona, a look held across a room.
Guides
How long should eye contact last?, How to do the Kubrick stare, How to do the Mona Lisa smile. All guides.
Other looks
Approachable, happy, open, confident, competent, trustworthy, calm, alert, intimidating. All ten on one page.