It took two years marked by his deprivation for us to collectively realize the importance of a smile in our lives.
“Arousing the birth of a real smile on the lips of someone who is facing you is the portal that opens”, underlined the writer Christian Bobin in an interview with France Culture. .
Of the forty muscles in the face to express emotions, seventeen are activated when we smile.
Read alsoHow our smile changes with age
It is an element of language, an openness to others, a form of recognition whose importance we have been able to measure in the context of the crisis that has marked the recent period.
"We are paid with a smile", also wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Conversely, deprived of this reward by wearing a mask and hiding our mouths, we felt an immediate tension in social relations.
Interpreting gestures and intentions had become more difficult, causing inevitable and daily misunderstandings.
In video, eight cult laughs of women in the cinema
“Smiling was the major way of contact with the other.
We had to reinvent the rituals of interaction between individuals, to ward off this absence of face, specifies the anthropologist David Le Breton who devoted the study
Sourire to it.
An anthropology of the enigmatic
(1) and explains how we got by without it.
Often, the word took over, we continued to smile through our voices, we reassured ourselves with formulas: "Don't worry, you'll be fine."
We mobilized the rest of the body, the fists that we clashed, the elbows, the head that we lowered to mark a certain embarrassment.
What now that we've removed the masks?
“We found the face with jubilation.
In our interactions, nothing has changed from this ritual anchored in us since childhood.
From the first years, in fact, we learn the polysemy of the smile.
What the anthropologist describes as the “thousand forms of the smile”.
Alternately benevolent, carnivorous, tender, this expression is the mirror of our social self.
Smiles, vectors of our emotions, are displayed more in the tumultuous, agitated, unstable context of intranquility of the world.
They respond to fat laughter, also from the period, and temper it.
"The Internet, above all, is bile", writes Rebecca, character of the book
Cher Connard,
by Virginie Despentes before opening up, over the exchanges by email with the other protagonists, at the very end of the work, to a form of general reconciliation.
Full screen
Fifteen years ago, smileys left the digital world to enter the world of fashion.
Some brands thus decline these small yellow pellets on clothing and accessories.
Illustration Eric Giriat
"Passport", "softener", as David Le Breton also defines it, the smile has become essential on social networks.
On the BeReal application, a small mention invites you to smile frankly before taking a picture.
Phone screwed in hand, Martin, 16, alternates between smiles and bursts of laughter when he
swipes
on TikTok.
Today's frozen selfies are answered by smiling videos.
The smile of the real world also invites itself into digital correspondence through the emojis that punctuate many of our messages.
And these pictograms have become transgenerational.
Children have passed the virus on to parents and even grandparents, who use and abuse it.
Fifteen years ago, smileys left the digital world to enter the world of fashion.
The Call It By Your Name brand is thus offering these little yellow dots this season on colorful bandana fabric bags, we also find them in the world of jewellery, in the form of medals in particular.
The world of lifestyle and trends has turned the smile into viaticum.
Teenagers are tempted by teeth whitening for an Ultra Brite smile, jewels bloom on the incisors of rappers and their fans...
From a smile born in the depths, we have slipped to a smile of civility, designed for the public sphere, which reconnects with that of the courtesy manuals of the 17th century.
On the death of Queen Elizabeth II, after seventy years of reign, everywhere was evoked this smile that she wore permanently, a symbol of constancy but also of restraint.
In the great game of emotion in politics, Emmanuel Macron would be a president of smiles, where Jacques Chirac would advance more as a president of laughter.
In a few years, the code has changed.
While, for decades, TV presenters wore a serious, circumstantial air when announcing bad news, they now sport that smile of civility which sometimes annoys and which gave David Le Breton the idea of the neologism "jokes ".
Full screen
The smile is an element of language, an openness to others, a form of recognition whose importance we have been able to measure in the context of the crisis that has marked the recent period.
Illustration Eric Giriat
The phenomenon even goes so far as to modify the relationship to information.
On the networks, new media have flourished which attract thousands of readers.
They are called @lemedia.positif, @positivR, @smile_infos.
If “solutions journalism” emerged in the 2010s, the context of the health crisis developed it.
The @Smile_infos Instagram account was launched by three Edhec students and their teacher two years ago.
“Smile was born the day after Emmanuel Macron announced the second confinement, in November 2020, explains Fabrice Poisblaud, former journalist and speaker at the great Parisian business school.
The project started from a desire on the part of the students to react to the macabre count that the Paris police chief made each evening, listing the figures for deaths and contaminations.
When classes resumed face-to-face, we were masked, and I noticed a change in student behavior,
real difficulty in communicating.
Pierre-Loup, a 22-year-old student, is part of the trio of founders: “I could no longer hear the words “mask”, “attestation”, “contamination”.
We wanted to show people that there are also positive things happening in the world.
To arouse a smile, two hours a day of searching for information are necessary for the teacher, who continues to run the account with 11,700 subscribers.
“I have 335 signs to tell a story that will make readers smile.
There, I made a post about the arrival of Teletubbies on Netflix.
On Smile, you won't find anything about the Queen of England's death or funeral."
We wanted to show people that there are also positive things happening in the world.
To arouse a smile, two hours a day of searching for information are necessary for the teacher, who continues to run the account with 11,700 subscribers.
“I have 335 signs to tell a story that will make readers smile.
There, I made a post about the arrival of Teletubbies on Netflix.
On Smile, you won't find anything about the Queen of England's death or funeral."
We wanted to show people that there are also positive things happening in the world.
To arouse a smile, two hours a day of searching for information are necessary for the teacher, who continues to run the account with 11,700 subscribers.
“I have 335 signs to tell a story that will make readers smile.
There, I made a post about the arrival of Teletubbies on Netflix.
On Smile, you won't find anything about the Queen of England's death or funeral."
I did a post about the arrival of the Teletubbies on Netflix.
On Smile, you won't find anything about the Queen of England's death or funeral."
I did a post about the arrival of the Teletubbies on Netflix.
On Smile, you won't find anything about the Queen of England's death or funeral."
To unravel the mysteries of the smile, it is necessary to decipher its springs, to constantly question its meaning.
The too immediate association between smile and acquiescence, smile and positive, must be questioned.
“I don't believe in the distinction between positive and negative.
There are genuine and deep smiles, and others forced and manipulative, specifies Fabrice Midal, philosopher and writer, author of
The Method Do not give a damn!
(2)
.
The authentic smile is precisely what breaks in, what opens a space outside the usual discourse, and that is why it is so precious, comforting, and makes us happy.
(1)
Smile.
An anthropology of the enigmatic,
by David Le Breton, Métailié Editions, 2022, 224 p., €22.
(2)
The Method Do not give a damn!,
by Fabrice Midal, Éditions Flammarion, 2022, 192 p., €16.90.
