Coronavirus: How to smize (smile with your eyes) when you’re wearing a mask

In a move coined by a supermodel, restaurant workers master how to smize (smile with your eyes) when wearing a mask.

Kimberly Cunningham, a bartender at Local Jones in the Halcyon Hotel in Denver, shows a ‘smize’. Picture: Wall Street Journal

Restaurant servers typically prepare for shifts by polishing silverware and memorising the day’s specials. Since the coronavirus pandemic, the staff at Local Jones in the Halcyon Hotel in Denver have embraced an additional ritual: making faces.

Teams gather in a circle with their masks on and run through a series of facial-expression drills that involve arching their eyebrows, crinkling their noses and, most important — smizing.

A neologism coined by supermodel Tyra Banks in 2009 on the television show America’s Next Top Model, smizing means smiling with your eyes. It involves bringing life to your eyes while keeping the rest of the face neutral.

Hospitality teams are adopting the modelling trick as they try to deliver service with a smile while the smile is out of service.

“The safety mask has truly transformed smizing,” Banks says in an interview. It is less about penetrating the camera lens with intensity and strength than it is about saying things like “How can I help you?” or “You can go first.”

When the coronavirus hit, Michelin-starred chef Akira Back said he knew he could figure out social distancing and heightened sanitation. “My biggest concern was how we were going to communicate to the customers through masks,” he says .

Boram Kang, general manager at Back’s namesake restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, approached the owner and shared that she used to be a model. “I was like, ‘yeah, yeah, so what?’,” he recalls. “Then she explained how she could teach our staff how to smile with their eyes.”

As a model, Kang was taught to keep her mouth in a neutral expression while relaying an inner sense of joy through her eyes. She spends five minutes before each shift practising smizing with the staff, who of course can move their mouths as much as they need to achieve the desired effect above the mask.

“The positive impact is felt by guests daily,” says Back.

He says he was so impressed by the power of the smize that he travelled to the US the week before the June 23 opening of Lumi by Akira Back, his new Japanese-Peruvian restaurant in San Diego, to lead a smize training.

Facial expressions are hard to read whilst people are wearing masks during he pandemic. Narelle Rutherford smiles underneath her mask. Picture: Alex Coppel.

In normal times, humans can get by with what psychologist David Matsumoto calls a social smile, or when the lip corners turn up but the rest of the face stays put. “This is the smile that greases the wheels of society and keeps us connected,” says Matsumoto, director of Humintell LLC, a San Francisco-based research and training company that specialises in the science of reading body language and non-verbal behaviour.

Before masks, the social smile could be used to acknowledge the arrival of hotel guests or to greet restaurant diners. Now, he said, we have to compensate by waving our hand or using our voice in a pleasant tone, or by perfecting the smize.

The smize is actually the upper half of the Duchenne Smile, the facial expression that relays genuine happiness, says Matsumoto.

Eye muscles only respond to true emotion

Named for a 19th-century French scientist who studied face muscles, it involves the voluntary contraction of the muscle that pulls up the lip corners and the involuntary contraction of the muscle that pulls the skin around the eye toward the eyeball and the cheekbones up.

It isn’t as simple as smiling extra hard. Studies show the muscles around the eye respond only to true emotion, Matsumoto said.

Guillermo Martinez, a front-desk agent at the Halcyon, says he struggled to smize on demand and had to practise at home. “At first I just looked like I was squinting really hard,” he says. “I looked pained. Now, I pretend I’m trying out for a Colgate commercial and try to flash an extra big smile so my cheekbones raise up against my mask. That usually makes me laugh to myself so my eyes naturally light up.”

Tyra says smile with your soul

Banks broke down the masked smize like this: “Think of someone you love ... someone that fills your heart with joy. Now imagine they are standing in front of you. Begin to smile, and not a blank smile that only involves the mouth. Smile with your entire soul. Even though your mouth is covered by a mask, that person on the receiving end will truly feel your kindness through your eyes ... and they just might smize right back at you. The synchrosmise.”

The Grand Hotel Tremezzo, a five-star stay on Lake Como in Italy, hired Alessandra Fertitta, a body-language instructor, to teach its 120 staff members how to effectively communicate with their eyes.

“People are scared right now, so it’s more important than ever for hotel staff to convey a sense of safety and welcome with their gaze,” she says.

Fertitta, who teaches at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, held four workshops where she had staff do facial exercises to activate the muscles around the eyes.

Hospitality workers are adopting the modelling trick of ‘smizing’ as they try to deliver service with a smile while the smile is out of service.

“I’d make them try to convey hunger, happiness, sadness, fear,” she says.

“I think everyone was surprised what you can sense and feel in people just through their eyes.”

The staff at the Halcyon have to practise making and interpreting micro expressions — brief and subtle facial movements that last a fraction of a second — to be able to express a welcoming nature as well as detect guests’ needs and emotions, says Chelsea Lee L’Archevesque, director of people and culture at the Denver hotel.

Her team used online training tools based on the research of Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the study of facial expressions who has developed workshops for the CIA focused on detecting deception through micro expressions.

Beware the fakers

“Now more than ever we have to be self-aware of every expression on our face and our guests’ faces,” L’Archevesque says. “We need to be able to determine who is fake smiling versus real smiling and whether someone is lifting the upper eyelids in fear or in surprise.”

Richard Delany implemented mandatory eye-expression training at the Relais & Châteaux hotel in Highlands, North Carolina, after a longtime staff member asked if he was upset with her.

Paul Ekman demonstrates a smile with and without the eyes. Photo: Paul Ekman Group

“I was shocked when she said I seemed unfriendly lately,” says Delany, president and director of Old Edwards Hospitality Group, which also runs the Old Edwards Inn and Spa in Highlands. “Usually I walk through the kitchen beaming a smile and high-fiving employees. I can’t do that anymore. If I came off as unfriendly and dismissive to staff who have known me for years, imagine what guests who don’t know me must think.”

Delany has departments line up every morning and do a touch-up course on smizing, as well as practise using an upbeat tone and exaggerated hand and arm gestures to relay respect and welcome.

“We’re in the heart of the South where Southern hospitality reigns,” he says. “It’s hard to say welcome to my home with three-quarters of your face covered up but we’re figuring it out.”

As an extra precaution, Delany took photos of all of his employees smiling and has them wear the photo on a lanyard around their neck.

“Guests can see the smize,” he says, “but there’s still nothing like looking down and seeing what the employee really looks like smiling without a mask.”

The Wall Street Journal