You must know the real intentions of the person you are dealing with. The good news I have for you is that body language can allow you to do that to a certain extent. Combine that with the ability to read facial expressions, and you will have a strong ability to determine the real intentions of a person.

So what I am going to do in this article is to let you know how to use both sciences to tell whether someone’s smile is genuine or faking it.

Before proceeding further, you must understand that depending on such signs alone can be dangerous since your mood can greatly alter your perception. Once you believe that someone dislikes you, then your perception will change and you might find signs that prove you right even though they don’t really exist.

Fake vs. genuine smile, how to tell the difference

The first and most popular sign that can help you tell the difference between a fake and a real smile is the movement of the muscles of the face. When a person smiles from the heart, many of his facial muscles move. You will notice that this person’s face developed lines and wrinkles around his eyes when he smiles.

If a person faked the smile, then probably those muscles won’t move that much, and so the smile would seem like it’s coming from the lower part of the face only.

Genuine smiles usually last more than fake ones. This means that if someone smiled, then their face remained like that for few seconds, then probably it’s a real smile.

You must be careful because a sad mood might prevent a person from smiling for a long time. Remember what I just said at the beginning of the article? Your mind could trick you into believing that someone hates you if you ignored such details.

When the smile is genuine, the bottom teeth will usually be hidden, and the cheeks will usually enlarge. Note that the person must get really emotional for this to happen, and again this alone isn’t an indication that a smile isn’t real.

What you need to look for here is the presence of the signs and not their absence. If the signs are present, then there is an extremely high possibility that the smile is genuine. If the signs aren’t there, then maybe the person is just sad today?

When a person smiles genuinely, crow’s feet, lines around the eye, usually appear. Also, The eyes are more likely to close, become narrower when a person smiles genuinely.

Look for the context.

It’s essential to look at the context of the situation when you try to read body language or facial expressions. In addition to that, you need to look at the other gestures the person is making. Are the person’s gestures matching his current mood?

Are the person’s gestures aligned with his mood and words?
Does he claim to be happy but uses opposite body language?

Once you learn how to see the full picture and not analyze something out of its context, you will be able to read people correctly.