London - Forget the sizzling pink suede wedges (£595) in Jimmy Choo’s spring 2012 collection and resist Mulberry’s new Harriet satchel in black buffalo (£850).
For proof that this is more than wishful thinking, look at the cover of UK Vogue’s February issue featuring the incredibly named supermodel Arizona Muse, beaming like a Belisha beacon, all teeth and positivity.
But isn’t that what models are paid to do, you ask yourself? To smile and look happy for the camera?
Not at the high end of fashion it’s not, as a trawl through Vogue’s back issues will quickly confirm. And definitely not when a model’s on the catwalk. A model’s pay packet depends on her ability to glower and to look convincingly sullen.
When did you last see images from a catwalk show in which the models didn’t look as though they were about to expire from unhappiness?
The fact is that the toothsome grin has always been the antithesis of fashion cool. Until now.
As we’re seeing in adverts for brands such as Clarks, Bally and Bottega Veneta, the grin is suddenly in.
According to Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue: ‘Models don’t like to smile in pictures. They tend to think it makes them look “too commercial”, which is why you don’t often see them smiling in high-end fashion shoots.’
To me, that translates as snobbery and exclusivity: the cheesy grin is OK for showing clothes from the High Street, but not for fashion at the designer end of the spectrum where looking cool is all.
But as Shulman explains: ‘At the moment, it is pretty gloomy out there and I think we all want to try to inject a bit of lightness and humour into the pages.’
At last, fashion is waking up to what psychology has been telling us for some time: smiling is good for us.
M ore than an indication of well-being or happiness, acc-ording to Dr Mark Stibich, smiling boosts the immune system, reduces stress, lowers blood pressure and enhances other people’s perceptions of us.
I’ve been fascinated by the business of smiling ever since my early 20s when my then boss, Helen Gurley Brown, editor-in-chief of US Cosmopolitan, ticked me off by warning that too much smiling would give me wrinkles.
Well, she was right on that count, but after a momentary panic that I was going to turn into a troll before hitting 30, I decided I wasn’t willing to compromise the positive response my smile elicited in exchange for fewer crow’s feet.
There was a time when the smile was wiped off my face, and that was when I suffered a two-year bout of clinical depression in my early 40s. ‘Cheer up, love, it may never happen,’ I remember a builder shouting from the scaffolding, as builders so often do.
When I countered angrily: ‘Too late, it already has,’ he hissed back: ‘B****!’ and I slunk off, feeling worse than ever.
But as I began to recover with the help of medication and counselling, I learned a couple of useful little tricks that have become habitual ever since.
The first, when I’m feeling low and walking down the street, is to focus on the horizon rather than the pavement. As the world opens up, I feel my spirits lifting.
And the second, if I wake up anxious, which I often do, is to smile to myself and keep on smiling (for perhaps 30 seconds or more) until I start to feel better.
At first it seemed so silly, putting on a fake smile in the dark. But I swear it does work.
In 1872, Charles Darwin first suggested that physical manifestations of emotions influence our feelings.
‘The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it,’ he wrote.
The 19th-century psychology professor William James went further, asserting that if a person does not express an emotion, he has not felt it at all.
Although most scientists would argue this today, there is evidence that the face, in particular, plays a big role in emotion.
It’s ironic that Botox, designed to make us happier about ourselves by freezing our wrinkles and making us look younger, has been discovered to have the potential to make us feel worse because it can limit facial expression.
Psychologists have found that being unable to smile properly when you are happy feeds back to the brain to reduce the intensity of feeling. In other words, no lines and muscle movement leads to a limited ability to feel emotions, too.
In the journal Emotion, researchers reported that the Botox participants exhibited ‘an overall significant decrease in the strength of emotional experience’ when watching emotionally charged videos, compared to those who hadn’t received Botox.
Psychologists Ursula Hess and Sylvie Blairy conducted a study in which participants viewed video clips of a person expressing anger, sadness, disgust and happiness, and the participants consistently mimicked each of those expressions.
They concluded that when you smile at someone, their muscles form themselves into a smile as well. In other words, by activating muscle groups that link to specific emotions, your body reacts as though you are experiencing that emotion.
And then, as you mimic a smile, your body will release the feel-good chemicals serotonin and dopamine.
As we grow older, perhaps our best weapon against the ageing process - cosmetic surgery aside - is our ability to smile; a simple action which takes years off us because the lower part of our face, which droops with the years, turns instantly up again when we smile.
My partner thinks that when I smile I look ten years younger. I don’t dare to ask how old I look when I’m not grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
With the economy looking increasingly gloomy, I predict a lot more faces smiling out at us from the top glossies.
The moment things pick up, the pout - as a hallmark of cool indifference - will doubtless return.
But for me, the smile is like the little black dress. And like the LBD, a grin is never in or out, chic or dowdy-it’s essential. - Daily Mail