I recently watched Better Call Saul with my girlfriend, and she mentioned how attractive Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) is when he smiled. (His smile is also creepy, since he’s a charismatic psychopath in the show.)

Maybe my girlfriend’s comment made me jealous, but I couldn’t stop thinking about his smile. I realized I realized I couldn’t smile like that. My smile muscles were too stiff for it to feel natural. Stiffer than they should be. Another effect of sitting at a computer programming all day, much like a hunched posture or nearsighted eyes?

I decided to exercise my smile muscles, smiling as widely as I could for about a minute, three times a day, for 30 days. The result is that my smile does feel subtly more natural and charismatic.

Much of physical attractiveness is not inborn. Most anyone can be at least a 7 out of 10 if they have a healthy body weight, work out (male), get a nice haircut, and so on. Many things that are attributed to poor genetics, like a weak chin, acne, or crooked teeth are the result of our habits. Mewing is supposed to fix jaw structure, skin care fixes acne, and growing up eating food that requires a lot of chewing, as in the case of our ancestors, leads to straight teeth. You can’t fix your upbringing, but you can at least get braces. When you see a person who’s pale, weak, and has poor posture, you may be tempted to think they lost the genetic lottery. However, if they went outside, lifted some heavy things, and didn’t spend all day conforming to the shape of their ergonomic office chair, they wouldn’t look that way.

I once realized I couldn’t snarl well, and then spent a few days trying to get better at it. The muscles were weak and shaky at first, but now I’ve gained the permanent ability to control the muscle with the longest name: the levator labii superioris alaeque nasi muscle. Now it’s much easier to express ironic contempt.

I’d have loved to include some before/after pictures or videos for you, so you could see the effect of doing the smile exercises, but I can’t really tell from the videos if my smile is better, because I can’t control exactly how much I’m smiling. Instead I have to use my own subjective judgment, which says there’s a clear but small difference.

If you’re going to try the same thing, I have two notes. First, when you exercise your smile muscles, try to get some cheek and eye involvement, and make sure you do it long enough to feel the burn. I didn’t time it, I just went by the feeling. Rest a minute or two after each. My original inspiration for the technique was this video, but I didn’t really follow it.

Second, if you’re at all self-conscious about your appearance, I’d avoid this kind of thing like the plague. Optimizing appearance in little ways is a fun activity for the confident, but poison for the self-conscious.

After doing this, I went searching for other facial exercises. I thought there might be more ways to improve your control over your face besides the smile muscles and the snarl muscles I’ve already experimented with. I stumbled across the Looksmax forum, where people discuss all kinds of “looksmaxxing”. Reading through the forum was certainly an interesting experience. Interspersed between the occasional good tip about posture or hair styling were casual advice to take steroids or get plastic surgery, as if there was no difference between exercising your smile muscles and having a surgeon slice the edges of your mouth to make it wider.

In particular, the bonesmashing guide was pretty unhinged. Bonesmashing, if you’re fortunate enough to be unfamiliar, is the practice of hitting your own face with a hammer in the hope that your brow ridge or cheekbones will grow more pronounced. Apparently it went somewhat viral on TikTok at one point. To me, smashing my own face with a hammer seems to be going too far, and is one of those idiotic activities that constitutes its own punishment.

I never feel insecurity about my appearance when looking in the mirror. I just think it’s fun to find little ways to make my life permanently better, whether that’s learning to touch type, or learning to express emotions better with my face. If you do feel dissatisfaction with the person in the mirror, that’s a problem muscle exercises won’t solve.

I’m done with this looksmaxxing stuff for now, but I may at some point buy Freeing the Natural Voice by Kristin Linklater or something similar to see if I can stop speaking with unnatural tension in my voice. I was inspired by a clip of Morgan Freeman (which I found on the Looksmax forum “voicemaxxing” thread) talking about how his voice was not naturally that deep, and in college he learned, with a coach, to relax the tension in his voice and lower his pitch. I feel seduced by this idea, because it seems like my current voice is the unnatural one, and I’d “coming home” to my more resonant voice. I felt the same way about my smile. My unnatural lifestyle led to the atrophy of muscles which by rights should have been exercised on their own, so I remedied it with deliberate exercise. Maybe one day we’ll be smart enough to engineer a world where people are attractive and healthy just by following their natural instincts, but until such time I’ll be here, taking supplements, lifting heavy weights, and forcing a smile in the mirror.