The Smile, Unmasked
Anatomy of expression in a world that demands performance
Smiling is the most suspicious gesture in the human arsenal. A baring of teeth that once signalled threat – snarling, growling, ready-to-lunge animal threat – now masquerades as warmth. We have rebranded the snarl into something polite. Civilised. But I’m not convinced. Smile at a stranger on the Métro and watch their body twitch with mistrust, like you’ve violated some unspoken Parisian decree of neutral indifference. Or worse, they smile back – and now you’re both implicated in something you didn’t agree to. What does he want? Why is she grinning? Is this flirtation, madness, or an impending scam? In our world where sincerity feels more suspicious than silence, a smile becomes an interpretive battleground. It is no longer clear whether a smile is an invitation, a defence, a glitch in the façade, or an accidental truth surfacing through the cracks of one’s habitual armour.
We weaponise the smile. We polish it, rehearse it, deploy it. There is the customer service smile, stretched thin and twitching under the weight of corporate mandates; the parental smile, masking existential fatigue with forced glee while pretending to care about slime videos; the seductive smile, loaded with curated charm and plausible deniability; the politician’s smile, which isn’t a smile so much as a public relations contract written across the face. But worst of all, more insidious than any of these, is the endurance smile – the smile that insists on staying even when the soul has packed its bags. I wore it through funerals, through long silences at the dinner table, through sexual encounters that I dissociated through like a good girl who knew not to ruin the mood. Sometimes people mistake this smile for grace. It’s not. It’s a performance of grace under pressure that protects others from the discomfort of witnessing pain. It’s a hostage negotiation with reality. It is also, if I’m being honest, a lie I tell to myself as much as to others because sometimes I don’t want to believe I’m breaking.
There’s an old photograph of me at seventeen, sitting on a stone bench in Florence, sun in my hair and a smirk still humming with the residue of having been just-kissed by a boy with Dante’s eyes and the arrogance of someone who’s never been told “no”. It’s a real smile. Open, careless, unsupervised by ego. But what that image doesn’t show is three days later, when I saw him kissing someone else by the river, and the smirk returned – sharper now, weaponised, deployed not to show joy but to survive humiliation without looking broken. Smiling can be a mask, yes, but also a blade. It is not always about connection; sometimes it’s about refusal. I smiled at him because I would not give him the pleasure of my collapse. I smiled because I had not yet learned the sophistication of disengaging, only the brute aesthetic of appearing unfazed. That too is a kind of victory, however immature. Sometimes smiling is not about joy at all, it’s about saying you don’t get to decide how I narrate this scene.
They say smiling is contagious, like yawns or measles or bad fashion trends, and in some contexts, yes, a spontaneous grin can create ripple effects of mutual delight. But most smiles in the digital age are not passed, they are posed. Instagram doesn’t reward sincerity; it rewards symmetry. We’ve become experts in the mechanics of grinning without the muscle memory of feeling. When you need a filter to smile at yourself, it feels quite dystopian. A friend of mine once tried to take a selfie after crying, the kind of crying that leaves your eyes puffed and your mouth trembling, and her phone’s camera prompted her to “enhance joy.” The absurdity of it made me laugh. Then she smiled. Then she posted it. And got a dozen comments praising her “resilience”. She hadn’t felt resilient. She had felt absurd. But no one wants absurdity. They want an inspirational arc. They want pain turned palatable. And they want it photogenic.
Women smile during fake orgasms, at dinners they regretted agreeing to, and while listening to men explain concepts they had spent years studying. They smile while being groped, out of panic and conditioning. I smiled at a woman who told me that perhaps I should write less about power and more about peace. Peace. As if a woman writing about peace is not, itself, a loaded political act in a world where her body is still not hers in many jurisdictions. A woman’s smile is often her most exhausted currency. It’s what she pays to be safe in rooms she never asked to be in. And after a while, she forgets who she is without that currency. Smiling becomes less about expression and more about managing the emotional ecosystem around her. It is unpaid labour performed by facial muscles trained to maintain male comfort.
And yet, there are smiles I trust. Smiles that are cracked, not curated. The kind that ambushes the face when someone hears a memory too sacred to share aloud. That crooked pull at the edge of the mouth, the half-hesitation before the smile emerges fully… those are real. They are not for public consumption. They are for the person standing in front of you at 3am while you confess something awful and human and unphotogenic. They are not symmetrical. They are not beautiful. They are intimate. I saw that smile once in a dying friend. She was too tired to say much, but she smiled at me like we had already said everything. That smile haunts me more than any obituary.
The Greeks had a word – charis – which meant grace, beauty, favour. But it also meant the radiant pleasure of recognition between people, the erotic voltage of mutual seeing. We’ve watered this down to hospitality. But true charis is electric. It doesn’t require teeth. It’s in the eyes, in the micro-muscles, in the pregnant pause before language. And yet even that, in our modern economy of attention, is now monetised. The influencer’s smile mimics charis while performing commerce. I’ve caught myself doing it too, curating intimacy for clicks, smiling in writing, if not in flesh, to preempt disagreement. The algorithm punishes frowns. It buries them. So we smile. Even while critiquing the machine, we smile to keep from being buried by it.
My Romanian grandmother smiled through dictatorship, poverty, back pain, and childbirth. She told me once that smiling made her feel less poor after the communists confiscated all the land and properties our family had. I didn’t understand that as a child. I thought she was deluding herself. But now I see: it wasn’t denial, it was revolt. Smiling in the face of misery was her way of not letting it own her. Of not letting a dictator have her face, too. She didn’t smile because she was happy. She smiled because the smile was still hers. That kind of smile cannot be staged. It is not aesthetic. It is ancestral. And it terrifies those who wish to govern through despair.
I’m wary of irony addicts who perform sophistication through permanent smirks. As if vulnerability were pedestrian, and awe a sign of naiveté. I don’t want to become that. There are smiles that split the face with such unedited joy, they make you believe in innocence again, not the fake purity of moral righteousness, but the real, reckless kind that erupts before the intellect intervenes. Young children have that smile. It arrives before language. It contains no self-consciousness, no brand awareness. It reminds me that not all joy is escapism. Some of it is access to something primal and uncorrupted, something that still lives inside the human animal, if we allow it oxygen.
Smiling when life is good is expected. But smiling when life is unravelling? That’s a kind of mysticism. The mystical smile is the one that emerges from surrender, not from certainty. Like the smile I gave when I missed my flight, spilled green tea on my white silk blouse, dropped my phone in a toilet, and then heard a friend had published a novel I’d basically ghostwritten. I laughed, yes. But it started as a smile. Not a happy one. An of course smile. A Beckett smile. A nothing is funnier than pain that keeps escalating smile. It’s not resilience. It’s resignation with flare. Sometimes I think the only thing standing between me and total nihilism is a well-timed smile at the universe’s absurd script.
There is a particularly Western pathology that demands we smile as evidence of gratitude. Especially if we are female, foreign, or marginalised. The immigrant’s smile, the first-generation overachiever’s smile, the thank-you-for-letting-me-speak smile… it’s exhausting. It’s also disingenuous. Gratitude is real, but when coerced, it curdles into self-erasure. And yet, I’ve smiled through it. I’ve smiled at awards ceremonies I felt alienated by. I’ve smiled through being tokenised, exoticised, praised with subtle insults wrapped in diversity-flavoured packaging. And then I’ve gone home and scrubbed my face like I was trying to reclaim it.
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with withholding the smile. Not in bitterness, but in honesty. I’m cultivating a face that only smiles when something in me genuinely wants to. It unnerves people. I’ve had friends ask me if I’m angry. Strangers tell me I should smile more. Smile, they say, as if my neutral face were a personal affront. But why should I perform warmth on command? Why is it my job to decorate someone else’s day? I want to reclaim the smile as something voluntary, not obligatory. As something sacred, not mass-produced. I want to remember what my face feels like when it’s mine alone.
Still, I smiled this morning. At a woman walking her dog in the Paris summer drizzle. I was also walking mine. We didn’t speak. But the smile was not small talk, it was recognition. Not of anything profound, necessarily. Just of each other’s continued presence. We’re still here, it said. Still waking up. Still walking. In this world that constantly asks us to be performative, productive, positive, and pleasant, sometimes all at once, that small, flickering smile between strangers felt like silent résistance. Not a solution. Not an epiphany. But a gesture toward something fragile and human that I still believe in. Maybe that’s enough? Maybe that’s the point? Or maybe it isn’t? I’m smiling now. For no reason. For every reason.
Unfiltered, unforced, unfinished, holding space for the un-posed face, with no performance, only presence, yours in all that cannot be staged,
Tamara
This is breathtaking, not just in what it says, but in how it says it. Every line hums with the kind of emotional x-ray vision that most of us spend our whole lives trying to avoid developing. You’ve taken the smile—this seemingly benign, universal gesture—and cracked it open to reveal its whole architecture of cultural coding, gendered conditioning, and silent defiance.
What resonated most deeply for me was the idea of the endurance smile, of course, the one we wear to survive spaces not made for us. That smile is its own language. I think of it as a kind of emotional Esperanto: a shared, globally understood shorthand for “don’t ask,” “don’t look too closely,” “don’t make this harder than it already is.” I’ve worn that smile in waiting rooms and weddings alike, the places where I was either too broken to show up fully or too full to break in front of others. And like you, I’ve watched people read it as grace, never knowing it was grief dressed in its Sunday best.
But you added a nuance I hadn’t considered before: the smile as a form of refusal. A refusal to collapse. A refusal to let someone else edit your pain into pity. That part, the smile that says “you don’t get to narrate this for me”, that cut the deepest. I’ve felt that smile rise in me like armor, like ritual, like a spell cast not to deceive but to protect a dignity that words couldn’t salvage in the moment.
I would add the heirloom smile. Not only the ancestral kind, like your grandmother’s (though that is so profound) but the one passed down less consciously, more like scar tissue than scripture. I’ve seen this with trauma: a mother teaching her daughter to smile through dismissal so smoothly it looks like elegance, not erasure. These smiles become habits, but also haunted gestures, ghosts in the muscles. We inherit the reasons to smile but also the consequences of not doing so.
And still, like you, I believe in the cracked ones. The imperfect, asymmetrical, glimmering smiles that slip out when we’re not guarding the gates. I remember a friend whose smile only ever appeared when she was talking about her dog, or eating olives. It didn’t perform. It just arrived. It was holy because it was uncurated.
Thank you for this, Tamara. I’ll be thinking about it every time I catch myself smiling for someone else’s comfort.
I don't smile a lot - not for any emotional reason, but because that's just my physiology. I can get away with it, because I'm a man and there's a double-standard that works to men's benefit in this regard. If anything, it probably works in my favor that I'm not so expressive because people chalk it up to being stoic.
That's really what you're pinpointing here: the performative aspect of expressions, and the expectations that come with them. Smiling is "nice" and in many contexts it can be an important signal, particularly of safety. Small talk isn't really about content, and asking "how someone is" is an expression of how YOU are, and is not an actual inquiry into another person's state. Really, we're saying "I'm fine" when we ask how someone else is. Or at least "you have nothing to fear from me."
Because smiling is a signal of safety or invitation, your suspicion is warranted.
The common thread in your examples is the self-referential nature of expression and even most communication. Words and gestures that appear, on the surface, to be for others, are almost always something more complex: they're an expression of our state of mind, body and emotional reactivity. So maybe the key to understanding people's expressions is to realize that even when they're directed at us, they're almost never actually about us; almost never personal.
Excellent, Tamara. I hope you're smiling, for yourself only.