Beauty Treatment: Permexpressions

When Bill O’Reilly said last year that Michelle Obama “looks like an angry woman,” a Vogue editor blamed her arched eyebrows. Michelle took heed and reshaped them for the inauguration.

We often use people’s faces to incorrectly judge personality traits. “Our emotion recognition system picks up on tiny resemblances to emotions in neutral faces,” says Christopher Said of Princeton, primary author of a paper in Emotion on the phenomenon. He and collaborators found that, for example, the faces of people who look social and responsible subtly depict prototypical expressions of happiness. And people perceived as dominant and aggressive display structural echoes of anger. Michelle Obama may have understood this. As her brows softened, so did our hearts.