Scientists Showed the Evolution of Smiles in the Past 100 Years

A group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, published the results of the study of the photo portraits, taken in the past 100 years, Wired writes.

The authors selected about 37,000 images, which capture the faces of Americans from 26 states, and then sorted them by date, to get an ‘average’ portrait of each decade.

One of the main results of the study is that the later the photograph is taken, the more often people smile in it. One of the authors, Shiry Ginosar, says that it has to do with the evolution of people’s attitude to being photographed: at first they used to take it too seriously and tried to maintain a neutral, emotionless face.

“These days we take for granted that we should smile when our picture is being taken, but in the past etiquette and beauty standards dictated that the mouth be kept small, – Ginosar explained.