National Smile Power Day is the perfect excuse to shine your pearly whites and show off those dimples. And no, a smiley face or an emoticon won’t do! Not today, at least.
The smile is a symbol of happiness and vitality, a beacon of hope and an expression of emotion. So just for today, drop the ‘:)’ texts and flash them a real smile. Go on….
What is in the power of a smile, one may ask. Well, when we smile we automatically trigger our own autonomic nervous system, which releases endorphins into our blood, to trigger a happy hormone. That being said, smiling at someone else, offers a chance for them too to feel that same happy hormone.
It’s a win/win situation isn’t it? Start everyday with a smile and smile at strangers, it’s good for your immune system and it brings a little cheer to an otherwise possibly dismal day.
National Smile Power Day Timeline
Darwin Analyzes the Expression of Emotion
Charles Darwin publishes “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” arguing that smiles and other expressions are biologically based signals shaped by evolution rather than arbitrary social habits.
Harvey Ball Designs the Yellow Smiley Face
Graphic artist Harvey Ross Ball creates the now-classic yellow smiley for State Mutual Life Assurance in Worcester, Massachusetts, to lift employee morale after a corporate merger.
Ekman Demonstrates Cross-Cultural Recognition of Smiles
Psychologist Paul Ekman publishes research showing that people in Papua New Guinea and the United States reliably recognize facial expressions of happiness, supporting the idea that smiling is a near-universal signal of positive emotion.
Meta-Analysis Reveals Gender Differences in Smiling
Psychologists LaFrance, Hecht, and Paluck publish a meta-analysis indicating that women smile more often than men across many social situations, highlighting how smiling reflects social roles as well as inner feelings.
Facial Feedback Effects on Emotion Quantified
A meta-analysis by Coles, Larsen, and Lench reports that adopting facial expressions such as smiling produces small but reliable shifts in felt emotion, lending measured support to the facial feedback hypothesis.
How to Celebrate National Smile Power Day
Smile at Yourself
If you want a little boost to your self confidence, let’s say you’re waiting on that impending job interview, you might want to smile to yourself beforehand. Smile in the mirror at yourself, a power smile instils a sense of confidence into you. Continue your power smile as you shake hands at the interview and continue with a sense of calmness and contentment.
Notice the Smiles
National Smile Power Day will also make you question just how much you smile as well as who around you takes the time to smile too.
Now, sitting there all day at your desk with a grin like a cheshire cat is not going to really have much impact, however, it should get a few laughs from your fellow co-workers!
You’ll start to notice the effect it has on those around you when you bring a little bit of joy into the room.
Boost Your Mental Health
Depression itself impacts just how much happiness we feel, and many psychologists and therapists will encourage the practice of mindfulness and smiling more, connecting and feeling a more internal peace with yourself.
Smiling forms a bond and connection between two people; whether that’s when they say thank you to you for holding the door open, perhaps it’s a smile you both share at a checkout or in a queue, or from far away, but it’s undoubtedly a very intimate and special bond that should be celebrated more often!
Commit to Smile More!
Challenge yourself, not just on National Smile Power Day but also on other days of the year, to smile at least once to yourself, to a stranger or to a family member.
See the response it has and the connection it forms; especially if you take time to let the smile last a little longer than usual. Remember, we all need a bit of encouragement at times.
Share with Others
National Smile Power Day is meant to be shared with loved ones and friends alike.
You can take them all out to a stand-up show, put together an organised smile-off, eat smiley-glazed cupcakes, drink some Smile Cocktails, and paint smileys everywhere because most people love them.
Most importantly, when you crack a smile today, remember that it’s not National Smile Power Day unless you can put a smile on someone else’s face, too!
Learn Health Benefits of Smiling
- Smiling lowers your blood pressure; now this is mostly due to the fact that smiling releases that happy hormone we spoke about before.
- The power of smile is also that it temporarily relieves stress, so smiling more frequently will put your body into a state of relaxation. In fact, smiling can even be a pain reliever! Allowing your body to smile and release that tension could help your body in so many ways.
- Smiling can also make you look younger. Forget about the laugh lines — the most troubling of all facial wrinkles is of course the frown lines which can make us look tired and withdrawn. Smiling allows you to work those facial muscles to keep them supple, practice it as part of your skincare routine and cut back on the botox bill, it’s not rocket science, it’s smiling!
History of National Smile Power Day
The idea of dedicating a whole 24 hours to the involuntary contraction of the zygomatic major muscle is certainly a stroke of genius!
This particular initiative started in 1999 when it was founded by none other than The Smiley Company, which is a brand of merchandise featuring the little yellow smiley face.
Whether fate smiled upon you or not, you can always find a good reason to smile. So grin from ear to ear, look on the bright side and smile your troubles away, just like the great Dr. Seuss suggested: “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
You may be wondering just exactly how smiling helps us mentally, but there are many reasons to suggest that it does.
We smile involuntarily when thinking back on fond events or about those we love, which is certainly a good reason to celebrate.
If you’re needing some more reasons as to what makes smiling such a dandy little tool, you can soak up the following information: it makes you more attractive, so they say, smiling attracts the opposite sex and highlights both your personality and radiates warmth to others.
Smiling is also contagious; the only time that something contagious is good for you – it encourages and promotes a happy and healthy atmosphere and brings a sense of community. So when you’re that person who starts a chain of smiles today, be proud knowing you have created a little bit of worldly joy!
Facts About National Smile Power Day
Smiling Can Physically Tame the Body’s Stress Response
In a lab study where people performed a stressful task while holding different facial expressions, those instructed to maintain a Duchenne-style smile (involving both mouth and eye muscles) showed lower heart rates and faster cardiovascular recovery than people with neutral faces, even though they were not always aware their smile was being manipulated.
This suggests that keeping a genuine-type smile during a challenge can modestly soften the body’s stress response.
Facial Feedback: How Smiles Nudge Emotions
Psychologists have long debated whether “putting on a happy face” can truly change how someone feels, and a 2019 meta-analysis of dozens of experiments concluded that facial movements such as smiling have a small but reliable effect on people’s reported emotions.
The effect is not dramatic and depends on the situation, yet the data support the idea that a smile can gently tilt feelings in a more positive direction.
Laughter and Smiles Can Lower Stress Hormones
Randomized trials of laughter interventions, which naturally involve frequent smiling, show measurable drops in cortisol, one of the body’s main stress hormones.
A systematic review and meta-analysis found that people assigned to laughter conditions had roughly one‑third lower cortisol levels compared with controls, giving biological weight to the notion that good humor and smiling can ease the body out of a high‑stress state.
Smiles Shape How Others See Intelligence and Honesty
How a smile is interpreted depends heavily on culture: a large cross-cultural study of participants from 44 countries found that in some nations smiling faces were judged as more intelligent and honest, while in others, such as Russia, frequent smiling could actually lower perceived intelligence.
The research shows that the “power” of a smile is not universal but filtered through local norms and stereotypes.
A 3,700‑Year‑Old “Smiley” on an Ancient Pot
Archaeologists working at the ancient city of Karkemish on the Turkey–Syria border uncovered a Bronze Age ceramic vessel dated to about 1700 BCE that bears a simple design of two dots and an upturned curve interpreted as a smiling face.
While not directly linked to modern emoticons, it is one of the earliest known artifacts to use a minimal dot‑and‑arc face to convey a cheerful expression.
Harvey Ball’s $45 Drawing That Became a Global Icon
The round yellow smiley that now symbolizes happiness worldwide began as a low-key corporate commission: in 1963, Worcester, Massachusetts, graphic artist Harvey Ball was paid $45 to design a morale-boosting button for an insurance company merging offices.
His quick sketch with two oval eyes and a wide, asymmetrical grin was never trademarked, but copies of the image spread so widely that it became one of the world’s most reproduced symbols.
The First Digital 🙂 Was a Campus In‑Joke
The sideways smiley made from punctuation marks originated in an early online message at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman suggested using “:-)” and “:-(” on bulletin boards to distinguish jokes from serious posts.
His note, recovered from backup tapes decades later, is the earliest known written proposal to use ASCII characters as faces, paving the way for modern emoticons and eventually emoji.
National Smile Power Day FAQs
