What to do
- Lift your brows a little: a lift that shows, 2 to 6 mm, well below a full raise.
- Smile, with your lips slightly parted.
- Keep your chin level, within 5° up or down.
- In person, make the brow lift a flash: up and back in a fraction of a second. Held, raised brows read as surprise.
- 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 “open” 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
- In everyday encounters filmed in three cultures, a quick raise of the brows came at the start of contact, usually with a smile, and signalled a yes to the contact itself (Grammer et al. 1988).
- Held, raised brows read as surprise (Grammer et al. 1988; Knoll, Attkiss & Persing 2008).
- Lips apart is one of the strongest approachability cues in everyday photos (Vernon et al. 2014).
- More eye contact read as more credible, attractive and composed (Burgoon et al. 1985).
- 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
The first second of a meeting: a greeting, an introduction, a hello across a room.
Guides
How to come across when you meet someone new, How first impressions work. All guides.
Other looks
Approachable, happy, confident, competent, trustworthy, calm, alert, mysterious, intimidating. All ten on one page.