No laughing matter as selfies ‘ruin smiles’
SELFIES have ruined the smile because grinning has been replaced by pouting, a historian has claimed.
Prof Colin Jones, who wrote The Smile Revolution, told the Hay Festival that technology had brought about a cultural change to the way people smiled.
The historian said that when selfie sticks were first used people would smile “and the face becomes like a Cheshire cat”.
Since then, the popularity of the ironic smile or “trout pout”, such as those struck by fashion designer Victoria Beckham and Vogue editor Anna Wintour has spread. “This is then where the duck face comes in,” said Prof Jones, which he described as “a caved-in look… slightly sucked-in cheeks”.
In his book examining the history of the smile, Prof Jones, from Queen Mary University of London, predicts that future historians “will be very interested looking back at this era”.
“I think there is something going on contemporaneously that is going to affect how the smile is valued and what it means. A coda on the wonders of narcissism is to look back at how social media changes the way we present,” he said.