A minute you can't fake
The camera watches the corners of your mouth and counts only when the smile is real. Drift off and the timer waits for you. Sixty seconds turns out to be longer than it sounds.
How it works
Thirty days
A calendar of thirty little circles. Each day you close lights up, and every half minute the circles gather into a smile and into your streak number — the screen turns into a face.
Facts while you hold it
Six short facts a minute: what the zygomaticus major actually does, why a smile in the eyes is so hard to fake, where the facial feedback hypothesis came from. Over two hundred facts — not one repeats across the challenge.
What a smile does
A slightly better mood
Even a deliberate smile lifts your mood a little. In 2022 it was tested on thousands of people in 19 countries — the effect is small, but real.
Stress lets go sooner
In an experiment with chopsticks, some people were made to smile through an unpleasant task. Afterwards their heart rate was lower than in those who kept a straight face.
Smiles are catching
When you see a smile, your face answers on its own: your cheek muscle tightens within a fraction of a second. Sensors picked this up even when the smile flashed by too fast to notice.
Coles et al., Nature Human Behaviour, 2022; Kraft & Pressman, Psychological Science, 2012; Dimberg et al., Psychological Science, 2000
With a friend, or a crowd
A shared streak
Invite a friend with a five-digit code and you get a shared streak: it grows only when both of you close your minute. Add more friends and the app gathers the group on its own, and shows how many of you smiled today.
It'll also measure your smile in metres. Seriously: the phone reads the distance between your pupils and estimates the width of your mouth from that. Reach a guitar and you'll be the first to know.
About privacy
The video stays with you
The camera is there to tell whether you're smiling. Everything is worked out on the device itself. Recording starts only if you start it, and it stays yours — until you decide to send it.
Free — and staying that way
We think a smile is something you give for nothing. There's a “tip the makers a smile” button inside, but it changes nothing in the app. Except our mood.
Coming soon to the App Store
Writing the last few lines and getting the release ready.
