There are several problems with my face, not least of which is that I look so bloody miserable all the time. Honestly, I’m usually smiling inside. A nice woman stopped me in the street on Sunday to tell me that she never looked very happy either. We were kindred spirits, she said, because she, like me, had a resting not-happy face.
She turned out to be a vicar, and said that when she did manage a smile, her congregations were very relieved and pleased. Nice. While I don’t have a congregation of my own, I knew what she meant. But still I think it’s time to change my face. Not with the help of a surgeon, you understand – I just need to give my countenance a bit of a lift.
The trouble is that as soon as I start thinking about what to do with my face, I find it even harder to know what to do with it. Catch-22. When I’m not thinking about it, as the vicar pointed out, my face defaults to something between neutral and unhappy. If I catch sight of myself, or someone asks me what the matter is, I try to make adjustments, but nothing sticks. And if I try too hard, I start to look a bit weird.
This was something I struggled with when I co-presented chat-type shows, perched alongside a colleague on a very brightly coloured sofa. My problem was that I never knew what to do when I was in the camera shot but not talking. Staring glumly into space didn’t look right. Occasionally, I’d see myself in a monitor, visibly start, and try to affect a correction. This never got me anywhere. I tried everything, but nothing quite worked. I plumped for sage, thoughtful, slight nods of the head, but couldn’t sustain this long enough to make it my go-to look. I tried glancing down to consult notes I hadn’t made, and then back up again. Every now and then I’d look across at whoever was doing the talking next to me. But not enough for one woman I worked with for a vanishingly short spell on BBC Breakfast. She took me aside and said I needed to love her when she was talking. Crikey. To be fair, when I was talking she did love me. I could feel her loving look boring into the side of my face – but I found it off-putting, so I asked her to stop.
I worked on smiling more, but when my co-presenter was saying something sad, it just looked weird. So I assumed a sadder countenance, which obviously looked daft when the subject matter cheered up. In the end, the corners of my mouth were going up and down like nobody’s business. As with everything in life, overthinking the problem only made it worse. I went back to where I’d started, staring bleakly into the camera. So no, I never sorted out my nonspeaking television face and I gave up trying, which may be one of the reasons I’m not on television much any more.
What is our “natural” face, anyway? Thomas Hardy thought that it was only as they slept that people looked like their real selves. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard beholds the girl he had thought was his daughter lying asleep. It’s only then that he sees the features of her biological father because, as he puts it: “In sleep there come to the surface buried genealogical facts, ancestral curves, dead men’s traits, which the mobility of daytime animation screens and overwhelms.” So your waking life pulls your real face out of shape, until sleep restores it, if only until morning. I find this idea compelling, even though photos I’ve seen of myself asleep suggest my ancestors wandered around with their mouths wide open, making terrible sounds. There’s surely something in it.
And if it was true in Hardy’s day, then it must be a lot truer now. Not because our lives are any more or less stressful; rather that, back then, there were fewer opportunities to curate the look you wanted by seeing what you looked like. I assume that in the 19th century, folk would only rarely get to see themselves – photographs were scarce, so all they were left to work with was their reflections in mirrors, windows or the odd puddle. And I’m quite sure that even, say, Tess Durbeyfield, on the rare occasions she got the opportunity, did that mirror-face thing when you try to curate the look that most pleases you. Eyes a bit wider, cheeks pulled in, the angle favouring one side or the other – you know the kind of thing. Think what Tess would be like now, with a smartphone to consult and selfies taken and distributed hour by hour, minute by minute.
It’s not just the strains of everyday life pulling our faces out of shape: it’s the constantly looking at and adjusting and photographing of our own faces that is doing the job. Or perhaps, in the eye of the beholder, not doing the job. In which case the services of a cosmetic surgeon are sought. I wonder if Hardy’s theory still holds true once you’ve been under the knife. Does sleep still reveal the faces of your ancestors, or has the surgeon severed branches in your facial family tree?
Anyway, having resolved to cheer up my severe resting face, I’ve taken the first tentative steps to undo nigh on 58 years of conditioning. Yesterday, I walked along Stourbridge High Street, under the ring road and through the park, trying all the while to keep the corners of my mouth turned up. It felt wrong to me, this half-smile – rather smug, as if I was conveying that I knew something that pleased me which others weren’t privy to. But I persisted, albeit needing my watch alarm to sound every minute to remind me to maintain the charade.
Fascinatingly, people did smile back more. Even the dog seemed to notice, making him more hopeful than ever of getting a treat. But my word, my mouth and cheek muscles did start to ache with the effort. Still, baby steps, no pain no gain and all that. I’ll press on, cheerfully.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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