What Do People Smile At, and Why Do They Smile?
The smile is one of those essential components of your physical appearance that we are born with and that most of us tend to look after but that doesn’t mean that every person has a beautiful and dazzling smile that can be compared to the works of Picasso or Goya. Smile is not simply an aesthetic factor but also a social one and it certainly helps you in building a friendly relationship with people around you. A healthy and positive smile can always have a positive impact on the overall personality of a person, so having a bright white, wide set smile is extremely important for your physical appearance and even for your social interactions with other people. This is why it is extremely important for us to care for our teeth and keep them in good condition to maintain the sparkling smile that is a source of attraction for most people and which turns away people who don’t like your smile.
The mechanism that is responsible for making our smile glow is in fact a complex process that goes way beyond the mere maintenance of teeth and gums. There is no single thing that we can do to make our smile more attractive or more radiant. A smile is mainly formed by flexing both the muscles in the upper part of our face at right angles to each other. Some smiles create a contraction of these muscles in the jaw area, an action called a Duchenne smile which is an example of a class 2 smile.
One of the most amazing facts about our body language is that the way in which we smile varies with our facial expression. A frown is the simplest and the most natural facial expression while laughing is the most complex and emotive facial expression. This is why we try to smile when we feel happy or excited while trying to laugh when we feel sad or disappointed. But the question here is that why don’t we just try to smile even if we feel unhappy? In fact, a smile is the best tool that we have to counteract negative thoughts or feelings and to divert your attention from them to something else. Thus smiling helps you fight depression too.
There is some excellent evidence on the effectiveness of Botox as a treatment for frown lines. Studies show that patients suffering from frown lines were able to eliminate these lines after they had been treated with Botox injections in their faces. The exact mechanism that makes Botox effective is by paralyzing the muscles around the forehead. When a patient smiles, those muscles contract and when they relax, they widen the smile line in the patient. In fact, Botox is the only thing that can successfully close frowns and gaps.
Studies also show that smiling causes an increase in the release of endorphins which are the body’s happy hormones. Therefore, a cheerful and pleased person may smile more often and wider than the happy people who do not smile as much. Therefore, a person who smiles a lot may just be happier than a person who smiles seldom. Apart from boosting your own morale, the good mood that a happy smile can bring to others will also make you happier with yourself.
Botox works by closing up the muscles around the face, but it is the wrinkles that cause the most problems. Smiles are usually open forms of expression that make the skin appear wrinkled; this is especially so with the forehead, the area commonly referred to as zygomatic (where the wrinkles are) or nasolabial (where the wrinkles are located in the cheekbones). However, there is a solution to all these problems. Smile surgery, which involves inserting a plastic tube through which a local anaesthetic is injected, can virtually close any wrinkle.