Those years are long gone when the only pictures you ever saw of celebrities were posed ones. In our paparazzi-riddled era, celebrities are caught off-guard constantly, captured everywhere against their will. This, along with other invasive aspects of modern life, has led to the phenomenon known in the gossip press as "bitchface," that peaky sour scowl that does not flatter most faces but lends a certain sexy menace to the most beautifully chiseled ones.
"Thanks to the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Kristen Stewart, the Bitchface became a bonafide red-carpet staple in 2008," ran a story at the entertainment site Zimbio, illustrated with shots of Miley Cyrus, Salma Hayek, Rihanna, Robert Pattinson and others squinting, glaring, flashing their front teeth not in smiles but in moues of unscathing disgust.
A humor website recently ran a spoof about Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham, who is one of the world's most frequently cited wearers of "bitchface" along with Jessica Alba and, remarkably, little Suri Cruise. According to the faux news report, Posh's "sour facial expression is not a result of uncontrollable moodiness or snobbery as so many people believe, but is a result of a very great wind change which occurred whilst visiting New Orleans several years ago," reads the spoof, claiming that the singer was struck by strong winds during Hurricane Katrina, and that her face "stuck that way." The story concludes with: "Posh intends to trial a brand new anti-expression cream being launched on 1st June for L'Oreal."
Our faces are masks. They're just extremely sophisticated, flexible masks that we can't take on and off at will. We can and do, however, control them. There's the rub. We are ostensibly always in control of them, but because they're non-detachable we often forget that they're actually there, that they're mobile, and that our faces reflect whatever's going on inside these skulls they sheathe.
Only when we remember this, often with a start, do we carefully compose our masks, creating expressions that we believe will convey whatever we want them to convey to whoever might see us.
But we also have default expressions: the way our faces look when we've forgotten they exist, which -- for those of us who are neither models nor entertainers nor very public people -- is most of the time. These default expressions are interesting because they reveal so much about us. They are clues to who we were and how we felt and what we thought during those youthful years when expressions become habitual. The default face is the true window to the soul.
My husband told me recently that I would be a lot more attractive if not for my default face. He says it's dour ranging on mean ranging on "Get the hell away from me." He demonstrates it, with creased forehead and frown and squinty eyes. Great. Why did he wait so long to tell me this? Apparently it's been true all the years he has known me, but he only thought to mention it when I asked him a few months ago how to improve my looks. (If anything's a loaded spouse-to-spouse question, that's it.)
"If I've got this horrifying expression," I snapped at him, "then why are you even with me?"
"You don't have the expression when it's just the two of us," my husband said. "You only have it around strangers, and walking down the street."
As always, he's right. I have been scowling nearly all my life. Why? Because kids were mean to me in grade school, picking me last for teams because I wore orthopedic shoes. Because I needed glasses long before I got them. Because I would almost always rather be alone. These causes and more fixed my face into that downcast mask.
But we live in a crowded world, and my walking around looking furious at you will help neither me nor you. So I have been working on my mask, and can offer these tips: There is a neutral expression, not a grin where we have to show our teeth (and, in my case, gums) but just a smoothing of the forehead and a slight uplifting of the corners of the lips. A semi-pleased look. This is all I can hope for at this point. After all, I am semi-pleased, as I no longer need fret about being picked for teams. Whenever I remember to attend to my face, which of course is not often enough, I relax my eyebrows and raise the corners of my lips. Thinking of something funny helps. At those moments, I am always startled to realize how tense my head had been and how far the corners of my mouth had been drooping down. I've spent so much of my life looking like a sad or mad cartoon.
