Smile If You Want To Look 10 Years Younger
My mother rarely smiles. When I arrived for lunch on Sunday, her hands dropped to her hips and she said: ‘Chloe, are you taking monkey glands? You look 10 years younger.’
My eyebrows shot up. ‘So do you,’ I replied.
And out popped one of her rare smiles.
Only humans smile. And the moon in its first quarter. A smile makes you look 10 years younger. Smiling is contagious.
I had come from walking in Battersea Park where an elderly lady hiking along with an ebony cane had given me a warm smile. ‘Good morning,’ she’d said, and I smiled back.
I was still smiling as I passed two joggers and they grinned the wheezy grin of people making an effort. I reached the lake where an Indian family were feeding the ducks with breadcrumbs. They turned with beaming faces and the ducks smiled as they went quack, quack, quack.
Scientists say it requires less facial muscles to smile than it does to frown. I must have taken the smile with me from the park and mislaid the frown I usually wear when I have lunch with Mother. Her compliment: You look 10 years younger, even with its tinge of sarcasm, made lunch a more happy affair and bodes well for the new year.
Look 10 Years Younger like the Mona Lisa
Smiling releases endorphins that make you happy. If you are already happy, you feel even happier. A frown does the same in reverse, spreading gloom like a virus. A trick to make yourself smile is to put something in the corner of your lips, like a pen top. Sounds silly, but it fools the body into feeling a rush of pleasure, and out comes those endorphins.
We tell our loved ones to say cheese to make them smile for a photograph. People spend zillions on cosmetic dentistry to get a Hollywood smile. Looking for a job? Smile at the interview, and you are half way to your first pay check. Louis Armstrong sang: ‘When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.’ Is it just a lyric?
The most famous smile of all belongs to the Mona Lisa, the best known, most visited, most talked about and most parodied painting in the world. The portrait has been permanently on display at The Louvre in Paris since 1797. If you go to see it, and you should, avoid the crowds by arriving half an hour before the museum closes.
Mona Lisa is captured full face with a smile that is cheeky, innocent, inviting and enigmatic, qualities that intrigue men and women try to project. Researchers at Amsterdam University in 2005 ran the image through emotion recognition software that declared Mona Lisa to be 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful, 2% angry, less than 1% neutral, and 0% surprised.
She is smiling. She is 83% happy, which sounds just about as happy as one can ever hope to be. Mona Lisa, the wife of an Italian aristocrat, appears to me to look 10 years younger in the portrait than she actually was, and the painting remains as fresh as when Leonardo da Vinci painted it in the early years of the 16th-century
Look 10 Years Younger – The Secret
To look 10 years younger: stand up straight, throw your head back and smile.
It’s so easy. When you smile, your eyes light up. The pupils dilate and take in more light, which then spreads in a glow through the whole body.
A smile goes against gravity. You push back the force of the universe, of time’s incessant arrow. Frown and you are racing the clock forwards. When you smile, you appear more confident, as well as more attractive. You really do look 10 years younger.
If you are in a bad mood, when you go out, make yourself smile and the blues have a habit of disappearing. Smile at the shop assistant, the bus driver, the person bringing new shoes for you to try on. Maybe they have the blues. Smile and say thank you and it will make their day happier.
When you smile, the surge of endorphins changes the body mechanism and you have better orgasms. Orgasms release hormones, which make life seem better. And when life seems better you live longer.
It is the last day of 2014. Time to make some New Year Resolutions. Here are mine:
Be nice to Mother.
Read more – good books only.
Smile.
Happy New Year – and remember this: you look ten years younger when you stand up straight, throw your head back and smile.
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