This is a guest post from Martin at the cosmetic dentistry guide. Enjoy!

How important is a smile when attracting others?

What would be the first thing you looked for in a member of the opposite sex; a perfect body, an ideal fashion sense, piercing eyes? Or perhaps a beautiful smile?

It’s fair to say that all of these things feature on some level to everyone when they scout a room looking for Mr. or Mrs. Right, but how important is one over another? To start off with, for arguments sake, let’s say that a smile is THE most important thing when it comes to being attractive. Now, this in itself raises a number of debates and theories as there are a lot of things to consider than just a simple case of flashing a quick grin.

Firstly, according to research, a smile can mean up to seventeen different things, with men and women interpreting all of these smiles differently. Then there’s the quality of a person’s smile to consider and how often they smile. When combined, these issues become confusing when trying to answer our question. So, how important is a smile?

There’s no getting around the fact that a smile will help. Any kind of smile. A frowning, grumpy looking face isn’t going to attract many onlookers at the bar. Smiling makes people more approachable, if nothing else, so it is certainly important as a first stage of building a relationship; friendly or otherwise. However, people can smile without the need to look attractive being their main goal, as a smile can be thoughtful, smug or proud. Research in 2007 also showed that the length of a smile could affect how others react, with quick smiles being seen as fake and longer on-set smiles seen as more authentic or flirtatious. The same study also showed that because women tend to smile more than men, their smiles are seen as less informative and less authentic.

So, a certain smile and the length of it might affect out attractiveness to others than simply any old smile. This theory might hold water, as you’re probably less likely to be drawn to somebody who’s smiling at you if they also smiling the same way at everybody else.

We can also tackle this issue from another angle. Picture your ideal partner, your man or girl. They’re dressed to impress and they’re looking at you… but they look as grumpy as a kid who’s dropped all their sweets. Does it ruin how attractive they are?

Picture the same scenario; your dream partner looking across the bar at you. This time they smile… a horrible yellow smile of rotting, crooked teeth. Now I bet that has ruined it for you. It would seem that the quality of a smile is also paramount for a lot of people.

Altogether, it would appear that smiling in any way, shape or form is a sure fire way to make yourself more attractive to others. However, the wrong length of smile, type of expression of smile and quality of smile is going to determine just how attractive that smile is.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important do you think a smile is when attracting others?

 Loading ...