Is ‘Resting Bitch Face’ Real?
[ad_1]
All through high school, Hayley Butler couldn’t understand why her peers treated her so coldly. Then, in college, two of her former classmates — bolstered by booze — confessed: Butler looked like she thought she was better than them, they said, and they were intimidated.
“In reality, I was so insecure and self-conscious, but my face read very differently,” says Butler, now a 36-year-old writer and consultant in St. Louis. “I wish I’d known what they’d seen earlier. I could have been more proactive so as not to be so misunderstood.”
What Is Resting Bitch Face, aka RBF?
Butler is a victim of “resting bitch face,” or what the San Francisco–based dermatologist Caren Campbell, MD, describes as “appearing angry, sad, or having little-to-no expression.”
The term, also known as “bitchy resting face,” was popularized in 2013 in a video by Broken People, the New York Times reported. It’s similar to another colloquialism, “permanent sad face,” which the TikToker Elise Ecklund went viral for describing, tongue in cheek, in 2022.
While not a scientific term, RBF has been (lightly) studied by academics, and treated by aesthetic medicine providers. There’s even a tool that can evaluate whether you have RBF, though Jason L. Rogers, PhD, the neuroscientist behind the technology, says the people around you are probably better judges.
“There’s no magic formula to say, ‘Do I have it?’” Dr. Rogers, a senior research scientist at Noldus Information Technology in Leesburg, Virginia, says. “If your friends are telling you, if your spouse is telling you, if your parents are telling you you have it, you have it.”
Here’s what else you should know about resting bitch face and what you can do about it.
What Causes RBF?
Though unusual, sometimes RBF may be a sign of a medical condition. For instance, some people are born with Möbius syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that typically causes weakness or paralysis in the face muscles, making it difficult or impossible to smile, frown, or raise the eyebrows, according to the National Library of Medicine.
“Flat affect,” or an unchanging and unresponsive facial expression, is a prominent symptom of schizophrenia, notes one review, as well as other health conditions.
When the face loses volume due to aging, weight loss, or breastfeeding, it can look like RBF too, Dr. Campbell says. “Over time, we also cause the overlying skin to crease from muscle contraction under the skin,” she explains. “These changes can result in downturned corners of the mouth that look like frowning or lines between the eyebrows that look like scowling.”
People with poor vision, too, may squint themselves into a more permanently furrowed brow, Campbell adds.
Rogers decided to look into RBF in 2015 after his neighbor joked that her daughter had RBF when she ran.
Using his company’s face-reading technology — which purportedly can detect trace levels of both positive and negative emotions — Rogers tested images of celebrities who have been accused of having RBF (Kanye West and Kristen Stewart) as well as stars who don’t seem to have it (like Jennifer Aniston and Blake Lively).
He found that people perceived to have RBF displayed trace levels of emotions that were nearly twice as high as those who did not have RBF. More specifically, the technology detected trace emotions — typically either surprise or disgust — in just 3.2 percent of “normal” faces, while it found 5.6 percent of RBF possessors had trace emotions — and that emotion was overwhelmingly contempt.
“I woke up at five o’clock in the morning and it just hit me: It’s the contempt,” he says. “It’s not genuine contempt; it’s just someone’s neutral resting face looking contemptuous. And, if you’re looking at me contemptuously, that’s creating tension.”
Rogers wrote up the findings with his colleague, published it on a blog, and sent it around his academic circles — where he presumed it would stay. But after a Washington Post reporter caught wind of it, the blog post — and Rogers’s inbox — blew up.
The response to the blog also alerted Rogers to the inherent sexism involved in the RBF conversation, which seems to revolve almost entirely around women.
“One of the big things I noticed was the sheer number of women who emailed me to tell me how often they hear, ‘Hey baby, you’d be pretty if you were smiling,’ or ‘Hey, are you happy? Tell your face,’” Rogers says. “No one would ever say, ‘Bro, you’d be hotter if you smiled. Life’s not that bad.’ But they have no problem saying the exact same thing to a woman.”
And while the cultural discourse around RBF is largely humorous, it’s important to point out that “bitch” is still a derogatory term for women.
“There’s plenty of published research to show that if a woman is impassioned, she’s ‘difficult,’ but if a man cares about his work, he’s ‘invested.’ If a woman is detached, then she’s also judged for not caring, versus a man who’s then ‘strong,” Rogers says. “So I never realized that underneath this RBF thing, this cultural thing existed — this whole vast world of gender norms.”
What You Can Do if You Have RBF
The first thing you can do if someone accuses you of having RBF is laugh it off and say, “Who cares?” It’s your face, and it’s perfect the way it is.
But if you feel like your RBF is giving people the wrong impression of you, there are some cosmetic treatments you can try. Fillers below the lower lip can literally turn a frown upside down. Muscle relaxers such as Botox, Dysport, or Xeomin between the eyebrows or below the corners of the mouth can help some people with RBF look (and, some research suggests, feel) less angry or sad, says Campbell.
According to one article, there is growing evidence that Botox injections into the area of skin between the eyebrows may relieve the symptoms of major depressive disorders. How this happens is not totally understood, but one leading theory is that the facial expression of an emotion causes feedback to the brain. Botox injections paralyze key muscles in the expression of negative emotions, thereby interrupting the feedback loop that would maintain and reinforce these emotions. Moreover, people who have depression may have a relative overactivity of these “grief” muscles that might be corrected by Botox injections.
Other “fixes” are more of an inside job. “You should maybe go see someone and practice some self-love and some self-care,” Rogers says.
That approach resonates with Alexa Meyer, the CEO of the mental health “gym” Coa in New York City, who first remembers being told to “smile more” while she was working as a server at a golf course.
While she’s since made a conscious effort to look more engaged in a conversation when she truly is, her effort to improve her mental health has helped her “realize that other people’s judgments and perceptions are not always accurate,” she says.
“Plus, being accused of RBF has allowed me to catch myself when I might be judging someone else unfairly,” Meyer adds.
For her part, Butler is helping her 11-year-old daughter, who seems to have inherited her RBF, be more self-aware. Rather than pushing her to conform to societal gender norms or change who she is, Butler says she encourages her daughter’s authentic self — which is warm and personable — to come through.
“Sometimes I tell her to ‘check her face’ because I know she’s not giving the vibe she intends,” Butler says. “Or, I say things like, ‘You’re looking fierce right now; is that what you’re going for?’ to give her that insight into what she may not realize.”
“Because,” Butler adds, “I know from experience it can be very hurtful when you’re left out or judged harshly all because of how someone perceives you.”
That said, your face is only one part of how you present yourself to the world, and your true personality likely shines through one way or another, whether or not you have RBF.
“We do not all communicate in the same way. Some folks are expressive verbally, and that may balance out one’s predisposition toward not being expressive with facial expressions,” Campbell says. “It’s important to remember we are all wonderfully unique.”
[ad_2]
