Smile: AI Analyzed Whether You Really Enjoyed That Family Beach Vacation

If you thought the perfect beach selfie was just about finding good light and the right angle, think again. New research from Beach.com claims to have found the happiest beach towns in America, and it didn’t take into account factors like weather, size of the beaches, or even hotel reviews. Instead, it analyzed your beach vacation photos. Or, to be more exact, 100,000 beach photos.

It’s one of the more unique (or at least quirky) uses of AI. Researchers found 1,000 location-tagged beach photos from Instagram from 100 different beach towns in the US. They then fed those into an emotion-recognition software called DeepFace, which it claims can recognize seven distinct emotions: anger, fear, neutral, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise. The researchers were able to determine “both how often people appeared happy in the photos and how certain the AI was about those smiles.” This allowed them to create a “happiness score” between one and 100 for each town.

By the way, if you assumed towns in Hawaiʻi must have topped the list, think again: none were included. Despite the state having plenty of beach towns, researchers only considered the top 100 beach towns with populations under 250,000 using Census Bureau data, which isn’t fully collected across the Hawaiian islands. So if you suspect Hawaii’s beach towns are the happiest in the world, you’ll just have to go see for yourself.

The happiest beach town in America

Photo: Sean Pavone/Shutterstock

Posted recently about Charleston, South Carolina? Whether you had a great time, or just managed to fake a smile during your family reunion beach trip, it worked, because Charleston took the top spot for the happiest beach town in the country. That said, there’s a lot to smile about in Charleston, a beach town with pastel houses, cobblestone streets, beaches within a quick drive, and she-crab soup. The AI analyzed 1,060 faces from photos, and found that 606 had “dominant expressions of happiness.” One can only imagine what the other 454 faces analyzed were going through — perhaps they were asked to sweat though linen suits at an August wedding, or made the mistake of trying to drive a huge SUV for the whole family through Charleston’s historic, narrow streets.

The aptly-named second-happiest beach town in America

Photo: Jeffery Edwards/Shutterstock

The second-happiest beach town in America is supposedly Mount Pleasant (a little too on-the-nose, no?). It’s just a quick drive from Charleston and known for seafood shacks, marsh views, and easy access to Sullivan’s Island. It earned a happiness score of 50.2, just a few points below Charleston’s 54. Without too many details, it’s hard to definitively say why it scored so high —  though the fact that it offers access to Charleston without the prices of Charleston’s boutique hotels could have something to do with it.

West Coast, best coast?

Photo: Moab Republic/Shutterstock

The third and fourth locations where people look happiest on the beach were both in California: Huntington Beach and Newport Beach, respectively. Huntington Beach, also known as “Surf City, USA” didn’t just score high for happiness. It also scored highly for “most expressive” faces, suggesting that the look on a surfer’s face after riding the perfect wave is one of pure happiness (or that plastic surgeons around LA are doing a great job). Carlsbad, California, was the only other West Coast beach town to come out in the top 10 — perhaps because visitors didn’t have to leave their dogs at home?

America’s least-happy beach town

Photo: Sean Pavone/Shutterstock

Poor Newport News. Out of the 100,000 beach photos analyzed, this Virginia Beach town had the lowest happiness score, at 23 out of 100. Unlike Charleston or Huntington Beach, Newport News isn’t really built around leisure. Instead, most of its shorelines are dedicated to shipyards and naval facilities. While that keeps the town’s economy humming, it does leave fewer places to experience summery, beach bliss. However, Newport News is on the James River and isn’t too far from the Chesapeake Bay, giving it plenty of beach- and water-focused offerings, even if it doesn’t have a billboard-ready tourist waterfront.

For the full list of rankings, visit the Beach.com report.

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