1. World Smile Day was inaugurated in 1999 by Harvey Ball, a commercial artist from Worcester, Massachusetts.
2. Harvey Ball was the man who created and popularised the two-dots-and-a-grin smiley logo.
3. A full smile, including wrinkling around the eyes, is known as a “Duchenne smile” after 19th-century anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne.
4. The words “smile” and “smiling” do not occur at all in the King James Bible.
5. According to a recent survey, a smile is the physical trait in women that men find most attractive on meeting them for the first time.
6. Smiling also came joint first with height and eyes in physical traits that women find most attractive in men.
7. Research has shown that smiling faces are perceived as younger than frowning faces.
8. Even artificially produced smiles have been shown to induce happiness. So saying “cheese” for a photograph really works.
9. “Wear a smile and have friends; wear a frown and have wrinkles.” (George Eliot).
10. The motto of World Smile Day is “Do an act of kindness. Help one person smile.”