The Curse of My Resting B*tch Face, And What We Can All Learn From It.

The man at the networking breakfast said it kindly. He leaned across the sausages, nodded at my face, and told me to cheer up, because it might never happen.

I was having a lovely time.

I’d been listening to someone talk about their business, which is the thing I like doing most, and apparently the face I make when I’m interested is the face other people make when they’ve had a call from the bank. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t cross. I was just there, at rest, with the factory settings switched on.

I have a resting b*tch face. Not a dramatic one. Not the kind that gets you a modelling contract or a restraining order. Just the standard-issue British male version, the one that reads as mildly disappointed in you when in fact it’s thinking about nothing at all, or worst of all, concentrating.

For years I assumed this was a me problem. A flaw to be managed. Smile more. Soften it. Do the thing on video calls where you hold a grin until your cheeks ache and you look like you’re being held hostage by your own good manners.

It’s also pretty rubbish as the entrance of a business consultant, or a line manager. Then I read the research. And the research changed my mind about what to do with a face like mine, and with every other fixed thing about ourselves we’ve been told to apologise for.

And surprise, ladies and gents, this mostly happens to women. Because of course it does, society was unfortunately built that way.

The tenth of a second

People, the people who study people, say that people have already decided about you. Yes you. Specifically you.

Alexander Todorov, a psychologist who spent his career studying how we read faces, found that it takes about a tenth of a second to form a first impression from a face. Not a considered view. A verdict. In his words, “it takes only a fraction of a second for these snap judgments to take shape in the brain, but their influence has a major impact on how we view those around us.”

A tenth of a second. That’s faster than you can say your own name. Yes even you, Al. By the time you’ve opened your mouth to be charming, the jury’s back.

And it gets worse, or better, depending on how you hold it. Todorov’s real finding isn’t that we judge fast. It’s that we’re wrong. “We are overconfident in these impressions,” he says, “although most of the time they are inaccurate as stable predictors of what you will do across time and situations.”

Read that again. We are certain, we are wrong, and we do it in a tenth of a second. Todorov himself, the man who knows more about this than almost anyone alive, says he’s “totally mistrustful of these impressions as a kind of guide to what a person is like.”

So when someone reads my resting face as a threat assessment, or in one truthful case, a need to walk across a courtyard and ask if I was okay and did I need someone to talk to, they’re not being unfair. They’re being human. Their brain did what brains do. It just did it badly, and with total confidence.

What the face is actually doing

There’s a whole study on this, which delighted me more than it should have.

Researchers Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth ran resting faces through software called FaceReader, which maps five hundred points on a face and sorts the expression across eight emotions. Most neutral faces, unsurprisingly, read as neutral. But the faces we label with the RBF tag were doing something specific. The software kept picking up one emotion above the others.

Contempt.

Not anger. Not sadness. A faint, involuntary trace of contempt. Macbeth described the tell precisely: “It’s kind of a tightening around the eyes, and a little bit of raising of the corners of the lips, but not into a smile.”

So the resting face isn’t blank. It’s saying something. It’s just saying it without permission, and about nothing in particular, to everyone, all the time.

I’ll add the part I can’t personally claim. Macbeth’s team found the effect isn’t really about women having more of these faces. It’s about the rest of us watching women’s faces harder. “RBF isn’t necessarily something that occurs more in women,” she said, “but we’re more attuned to notice it in women because women have more pressure on them to be happy.” I get the mild, forgivable version of a thing that gets women hammered.

So what do you do with a fixed negative?

You can’t smile permanently. I’ve tried. It reads as either a hostage or a hazard.

You can’t reason with a tenth of a second. The judgement’s made before your argument arrives.

So you’re left with the real question, which turns out to be bigger than my face. What do you do with a thing about yourself, or your business, that you can’t change and that people read as a negative?

There are three moves. I use all three, in order.

Forewarn. Name the thing before anyone else can. I now tell people, early and cheerfully, that my face lies. “Ignore the face, I’m actually enjoying this.” It takes four seconds and it disarms the whole misread, because I’ve said it first, which means I’m clearly not ashamed of it, which means it can’t be used against me. The thing you name yourself stops being a weakness and becomes a wink.

Should I have to do this? No? Can I change people? The Buddha says no.

This works far past faces. It’s the small consultancy telling a big client, up front, “there’s one of me, not forty, and here’s exactly why that’s the point.” It’s the founder saying the thing the room is already thinking. You don’t hide the perceived flaw. You hand it over, on your terms, with the framing attached.

Move past it. Having named it, drop it. They forewarn, then they keep apologising, and the apology becomes the whole personality. Say it once. Then behave as if it was never a problem, because it isn’t. Your job now is to be so plainly good at the thing that the first impression gets overwritten. The tenth of a second is powerful, but it isn’t permanent.

Or, better, embrace it. This is where the research stops being consolation and starts being a strategy.

In 1966 a psychologist called Elliot Aronson ran an experiment that should be taught to everyone who’s ever felt too flawed to be taken seriously. He had people listen to a recording of someone answering quiz questions brilliantly. Then, in some versions, that same impressive person clumsily spilled a cup of coffee all over themselves.

The blunder should have cost them. It did the opposite. The competent person who spilled the coffee was rated more likeable than the competent person who didn’t. The flaw didn’t diminish them. It made them human, magnetic.

They named it the pratfall effect. The catch is that it only works one way round. You have to be good first. A capable person with a visible flaw becomes more likeable. A mediocre person with the same flaw just becomes more mediocre. The flaw isn’t the asset. The flaw plus the competence is the asset. The coffee only helps the person who was winning the quiz.

Which is the whole thing, really. Kristen Stewart, who has spent a decade being told her face looks unimpressed by the entire film industry, put it more simply than any study. “I actually smile a lot,” she said. “I literally want to be like, dude, you would think I was cool if you got to know me.”

That line is the pratfall effect in a sentence. The face is the coffee. The getting-to-know-me is the quiz. You just have to make sure people stay in the room long enough to find out you were good all along.

Back to the sausages

I didn’t tell the man at the breakfast any of this. He was being kind, in the way that people who tell you to smile are almost always being kind. I just grinned at him, which visibly relieved him, and went back to my conversation with my face at rest.

The thing I was self-conscious about for years turned out to be the least interesting fact about me. So no, I won’t cheer up. But I promise you, it already happened, and I was glad the whole time.

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