Think you’re more Julia Roberts than Morticia Addams when it comes to your smile wattage? Soon there will be a way to know exactly how much pulling power your smile has.
With a career in beauty, you pretty much need to smile. All.The. Time.
From the moment you greet your client for their appointment, keeping a smile on your dial (or at the very least, a good-natured grin) is pretty much mandatory until the moment you say cheerio. But are you being convincing? While you’re trying to win “nicest person on the planet” status, she might actually be thinking “wow, so patronising I can’t wait to get out of here”.
Shiseido is coming to your rescue. It’s an app that cleverly measures facial movements to rate the quality of a person’s smile. The scale is a dreary zero to a head-turning Audrey Hepburn blazer at 120.
In a bid to set the record straight on just how important a good smile can be, the Japanese cosmetics giant will test the app on 5000 flight attendants (now there’s a profession that requires Olympic-level smiling abilities) in a trial that’s set to last several months.
The app won’t launch commercially until early 2017, but when it does, it could be a plus for the beauty industry to work out whether our dials are portraying trustworthy positivity or barely-concealed disdain (and everything in between).
But don’t think that top-grades automatically means sale-converting effectiveness. “Even if you have a 120 rating smile, it doesn’t mean it’s the best smile”, says Shiseido spokesperson. “For instance, a smile could be perceived as more elegant even when the overall rating is 80.”
It seems, sometimes less than perfect wins after all.