My Next Venture: Describing a Smile

Writing Exercises | Moose

I am still yet to post up some of my descriptions of males, but for now I am going to share something that I am working on this week:

                Describing the smile

I will admit, that so far, this has been hard. Describing a person can be as simple as just finding a place to sit down, and observing someone, from their mannerisms to the way that they dress and act. You can learn a lot about someone in just ten minutes of sitting there.

A smile, as I have regrettably found out, is so hard to come by. People in a city, or at least the one’s that I have encountered so far in London, do not smile regularly. They walk to the station, with deadpan faces, get the train and sit there, without emotion, playing on their phones. They will then walk to work where, although some may talk and laugh at times, the focus is on work and they are often found to be quiet. By the end of the day, they are tired and, as a result, do not smile. (Note: I am not trying to describe a laugh, so those attempts at work to grab my attention have failed to draw me in). I cannot look at something online because many of those smiles are clearly faked for a photo.

A Smile is a very human emotion, and, having read up on it, is a very reactive one.

Without purposely doing so, though, this is the perfect week to try and describe a smile as I chose this time to perfect my own smile. I had heard that it is a great way to improve your social ability (something that I am lacking in at times). Due to this, I have done a lot of reading up on what makes a smile, and where I originally thought that a smile is revealing in the movement of the lips, a genuine smile uses a great deal of the muscles around the eye.

This is a particularly good blog (obviously not a reputable source but effective nonetheless to give me a basic understanding that I can build on), so have a read:

https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-science-of-smiling-a-guide-to-humans-most-powerful-gesture

A smile can lead to a smile.

This is what I intend to do over the next few days: I will show off my improved smile to random people, on the train, in the tube, at work, and hopefully they will respond with the genuine smile that I crave. This will help me to improve my ability to describe a smile. I have described some that I have seen, which I will post up before the end of the week, but as I have said, it has been rare to see one.

I look forward to this. I enjoy smiling, and, more significantly, I love that very human response: the smile.