Can smiling wreck your facial harmony?

If you’re a vampire and/or an Ethereal Dramatic, you may feel self-conscious about your smile: you may worry that it doesn’t harmonize with your face’s otherworldly, intimidating vibes.

Beautiful Robert Pattinson embodies a convincing vampire with his Ethereal Dramatic face type. This isn’t the facial expression he has on the movie posters.

Of all the types, a Natural’s resting face may best approximate a smile. This is because Naturals tend to have wide, friendly faces, and smiles tend to make faces look wider and friendlier. So Naturals may appear especially harmonious smiling.

But what about other types, like Romantics and Ingenues, who have rounded lips and eyes—features that can appear less rounded, and so maybe less harmonious, when narrowed by a smile? Should some types not smile at times when they want to look their best?

And what if you have a characteristically serious, brooding face? Can vampires, and Ethereal Dramatics more broadly, pull off a smiling face? Or will they only look their best with a neutral or menacing expression?

Vampire case study: Ethereal Dramatic Robert Pattinson

To answer the question of whether Ethereals and Dramatics can look harmonious smiling, we’ll first consider Ethereal Dramatic Robert Pattinson, who played the lead vampire in the Twilight movies.

image credit: "Robert Pattinson" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

image credit: "Robert Pattinson" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

image credit: "Robert Pattinson" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

image credit: "Robert Pattinson" by Sparkle in the sun is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Based on these photos, you could argue that Robert Pattinson looks less harmonious when he smiles with his teeth, because a big smile alters some of his features in a way that changes their inherent shapes and vibes. (For example, his narrow jaw becomes a lot wider when he smiles.) I might agree with that argument.

But I’d also argue that a smile is an exception to the principle of facial harmony.

The principle of facial harmony is that you’ll generally look your most harmonious—and most beautiful—if what you put on and around your face harmonizes with the shapes and vibes of your face.

Smiles are an exception to this rule because we’re innately wired to smile, and we also seem wired to have a positive reaction to smiling faces.

This article explains that smiles are universal and innate:

"What is especially interesting is that you do not have to learn to do any of this--it is preprogrammed behavior. Kids who are born blind never see anybody smile, but they show the same kinds of smiles under the same situations as sighted people."

What does this have to do with being a vampire and worrying that your smile doesn’t harmonize with your face? I’d argue that because smiles are such an instinctive behavior, and have such important social significance, we’re wired to like and see smiles as beautiful—even when a smile isn’t technically harmonious with a given face.

Hollywood’s most famous smile

Sometimes when Ethereal Dramatics smile, it’s especially captivating and beautiful, maybe because the width of a smile stands out so much on their narrow faces.

Julia Roberts, who has Ethereal, Dramatic, and Gamine in that order, exemplifies this phenomenon:

image credit: "Julia Roberts" by John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

image credit: "August 05" by GabboT is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Her smile isn't necessarily harmonious with her face—its width isn’t consistent with her face’s narrowness—but it’s beautiful.

Going back to the idea that smiles are instinctual, we can also think about how when people smile, it often elicits a positive response in us. Humans seem wired to mirror, at least to some degree, the mannerisms, expressions, and emotions of others.

From this perspective, smiles that aren’t highly harmonious—such as wide, friendly smiles on narrow, intimidating faces—may have a particularly strong effect on the viewer, because they’re more noticeable. Their contrast with the surrounding features really makes them stand out.

So the reason people love Julia’s smile might not be that it’s especially harmonious with her face. People might love her smile in part because it’s not harmonious with her face, and this contrast makes it especially salient and so elicits an intensely positive reaction.

Maybe. Maybe not. Just a hypothesis.

More smiles: Emilia Clarke, Alexandra Daddario, Naomi Campbell

As mentioned, Ingenues and Romantics tend to have very rounded features, and a smile tends to make features like eyes and lips appear less round. So it’s possible that Ingenues and Romantics may look less harmonious smiling, especially if they don’t have any Natural.

Here’s Ethereal Dramatic Ingenue Emilia Clarke, smiling and not smiling:

image credit: "Emilia Clarke" by gdcgraphics is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

And Romantic Ethereal Gamine Alexandra Daddario:

It’s harder to see that Emilia Clarke has rounded Ingenue features when she smiles. And when Alexandra Daddario smiles, it’s harder to see her curving Romantic and Ethereal features, because those features stretch and narrow.

But for Ingenue, smiles are consistent with the essence’s sweet, agreeable vibe. And Romantic’s passionate vibe can embody many different intense emotions, including positive ones.

So even if smiles aren’t harmonious with the literal rounded shapes of Ingenue and Romantic features, smiles may be harmonious with the figurative vibes of these features.

Regardless of whether their smiles harmonize with their faces, both are beautiful smiling. Their faces exude joy.

Some faces with a lot of Romantic, Ethereal, and Dramatic may also appear consistently harmonious with or without a smile. Romantic Ethereal Dramatic Naomi Campbell, for instance, appears harmonious with both expressions:

image credit: "Naomi Campbell Cannes cropped" by Naomi_Campbell_Cannes.jpg: Georges Biard derivative work: Born Slippy (talk) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

image credit: "Naomi Campbell Cannes 2017 2" by Georges Biard is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Do some people look their best not smiling?

Smiles are a paradox in that even if they aren’t harmonious on your face, they can still be incredibly beautiful on your face. The infectious beauty of a smile may be equally or more powerful than the beauty of a harmonious face.

So the question of whether people with certain style essences look less harmonious when they smile ultimately may be irrelevant.

But if we really have to answer

I think some faces look less harmonious smiling. Robert Pattinson’s, for instance. To be clear, I don’t think he’s less beautiful when he smiles. Still, you can make a fair argument for why a smile doesn’t harmonize as well with his facial geometry as a brooding expression.

I make the point about Pattinson potentially being less harmonious with a smile than a straight face not to be mean—I think he’s extremely good-looking, in case it’s not obvious—but rather because I think the knowledge that certain types of faces may lack some degree of harmony when smiling could actually be helpful for some people. It may help some people be less critical of their faces in photos, for example. Less perfectionistic.

One of my favorite principles of style analysis is that no one can look their best all the time. No one can look their best in all the different styles of clothing or in every hairstyle that exists or in every kind of makeup. No one looks their best from every angle or in all different types of lighting, and maybe no one looks their best with all different types of facial expressions.

And that’s ok. I’ve seen a concerning phenomenon where people sometimes reference one single photo of a celebrity to illustrate why that celebrity isn’t actually attractive or whatever.

One photo is just one photo. One facial expression is just one facial expression. Depending on the lighting, angle, expression, clothes, hair, makeup, etc., any given person can look vastly different, even unrecognizable, from one photo to another.

You aren’t defined by how you look in a single photo, or from a single angle, or with a single type of facial expression. So if you don’t find yourself especially harmonious when you smile, that’s ok—it doesn’t diminish your beauty.

Especially the people who care about us and most matter to us presumably want to see us happy. So they should see us as beautiful with a smile, regardless of whether it’s harmonious.