[balladeer]

OT, but as a non-American I have always wondered what are the origins of those "smiling, teeth slightly showing" corporate mugshots? And I've started to see these from other places as well (like in my own country), of late.

An example (this stuck with me as I had seen it in an article years ago): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjay-jha-a91240b9

Then, there's this aspect that creeps me out is when you pass someone and you get that fake, as if it's mandatory, "pulled cheek" smile (My HRs do that as well). It just reduces the value of a smile to nothing.

I liked it that when I was backpacking in Europe nobody usually gave me that mandatory non-smile smile.

[squarefoot]

European here. I usually stay away from people who smile with their face but not their eyes; that's a sign they're not sincere. I mean not the half smile put there just to avoid a neutral expression, but a smile that attempts to appear warm and deep while it's not. Especially at work, the more the people I met who were good at it, the more I did my best not to have to deal with them, because to be good at it they must have trained it, which to me spoke volumes about the person.

[xnyan]

As an aside, if you want to make a genuinely warm smile but are not feeling it, this trick usually works for me. I think about my partner, or a beloved childhood memory, or something else along those lines. I just close my eyes for a second and focus on that, then let my face smile while I think about the happy memory.