Smile works how many muscles

Whenever we feel joy or sadness, become scared or surprised — our facial muscles contract and relax with precision and in excellent harmony. They deliver our message to the world.

Just one smile can tell us much more than a thousand words. To produce a genuine smile we need a highly coordinated work of many facial muscles. This can become quite a challenge if the recovery takes longer than a couple of months.

This article is also available in a video format in our Bell's Palsy Video Course. Click here to learn more. Please study the facial muscles carefully. Before we go on, we need to understand what are muscle synergists and antagonists. Muscles that produce movements in opposite directions are called antagonists. Frontalis muscle — lifts the eyebrows, makes horizontal forehead wrinkles when we are surprised.

Orbicularis oculi — the circular muscle of the eye consists of two muscles. Closes the eyelids, squints the eye. These two muscles are antagonists. Lift and hold your eyebrow with your finger and then try to squint your eyes. Procerus — is a frown muscle. Pulls medial sides of eyebrows down and together. Zygomatic muscles major and minor — move the mouth corners up and outward when we smile. Pulls mouth corners laterally outward and forms dimples in the cheeks. This muscle is not always active in all people.

Orbicularis oris — the circular muscle of the mouth. April 22nd, 2 Comments. Why should I laugh? March 14th, 1 Comment. January 14th, 1 Comment. Hafiz Laughter. January 12th, 2 Comments. January 2nd, 0 Comments.

Leave A Comment Cancel reply Comment. Toggle Sliding Bar Area. Nov 16 Zoom Hour of L. Jan 11 - Dec 17 To smile it takes not just your mood but also a lot of muscles of your face to bring a smile. Let us look at all the muscles which are responsible to make you smile. There have been misconceptions around that it takes a lot of muscles to frown and lot less to smile so it is better to smile, this is not true as the muscles responsible to Frown and smile are almost same in number.

However, the number of muscles differs from the type of emotion which the person is expressing and also differs from person to person as the smile patterns of each human are completely different.

We have to also keep in mind that there are different types of smiles, some are genuine which extends from one corner of the mouth to the other, fake smile, blushing smile etc. So in each case, the number of muscles responsible for that particular type of smile might differ.