Do you Have a Resting Bitch Face?

RBF means Resting Bitch Face means a grumpy facial expression. Incidentally, there are also men among this group. To show such a look should not be difficult in the current crisis period. But it was new to me that you could make a lot of money with it.

The US journalist Taylor Orci (IG taylororci) came up with the phrase “Resting Bitch Face”, after being constantly asked about her sad face. But as a comedian, she is anything but a sad person. Incidentally, at men she describes the phenomenon as “Resting Asshole Face”. The most famous RBF is the cat “Grumpy”, who thanks to her grumpy expression has become a super influencer. The grim look brought her a wax figure Madame Tussauds in San Francisco and her owner Tabatha Bundesen a lot of money. It is said to have earned 80 million euros in two years with the portrait of her angry cat. Grumpy Cat, whose real name was “Tardar Sauce”, died 2019 at home after contracting a urinary tract infection.

A natural phenomenon

If you want to get money and fame with a grim face like cat Grumpy, there is a requirement: The grumpy expression has to be real and not fake. A face that doesn’t look friendly or even arrogant to others is an unjust mood of nature. The steep lines between the eyebrows that are already present in the calm face are responsible for this, as well as pronounced teardrops lines. Also dropping eyelids and corners of the mouth which are pointing down send non-verbal messages: annoyed, repellent, in a bad mood.

Welcome to the Club!

You are often asked, what is bugging you or if something bad happened? Or you are regularly asked to laugh? And if you finally smile, the smile feels strange on your face? Then you belong to the group of „Grumpy Cats“. But that does not mean that you are actually a sour pot and are always in a bad mood. Only your facial expressions doesn’t exactly look like exuberant joie de vivre. But a little comfort: You have many fellow sufferers – from movie celebrities to royals. In Hollywood in particular, the land of everlasting smiles, grumpy faces stand out even more clearly in addition to the tons of smiling people. Above all, Designer Victoria Beckham, who even if she accidentally smiles, looks like she has to burst into tears. In thoughtless moments, also Queen Elizabeth, Kristen Stewart, Lana del Rey and Kanye West always look as grim as if they had been forced to do something terrible. Even as a little girl, the actress Anna Kendrick („Twilight“-Saga) was constantly asked to laugh. Therefore, she suggested a photo filter for all bitch face victims via Twitter. The contemporary American painter, street artist and illustrator Tatyana Fazlalizadeh also fought publicly against female kindness constraint. She put oversized street art portraits of serious women in Brooklyn entitled “Stop Telling Women to Smile!“ Her message: My face is mine. With that she condemned the edict to smile constantly. She compared it as an inadmissible interference in the self-determination of women as propagated ideals of beauty and behavior. Ordinary people, whose face is often in the way of contact with their environment, exchange their experiences in RBF online forums.

Facial analysis called „FaceReader”

How could it be otherwise, the scientists have also investigated the grim face phenomenon. More specifically, it was developed by the two programmers, Abbe Macbeth and Jason Rogers, of the Dutch tech company Noldus Information Technology. Their software “FaceReader” translates faces into emotions such as joy, fear, grief, anger, disgust and contempt. To do this, the program analyzes tiny facial muscle movements that are barely perceptible to us. In contrast to a human viewer, the assessment by the software is completely objective. Macbeth and Rogers ran photos of celebrities through the program, each with a neutral facial expression. It calculated the percentages of emotions that were recognized in the faces. The result: In all of those who were not RBFs, the “FaceReader” showed 97 percent of the “neutral” facial expression. One emotion predominated in the notorious “Resting Bitch Faces”: contempt. Now we have the confirmation that the corners of the mouth hanging down, raised eyebrows and a bored look reflect contempt. No wonder that such facial expressions are automatically assigned to an unpleasant person by the viewer. Even if that’s actually not true, and the person behind it is quite nice and not a bad bitch. The research project also proved that the RBF is not a predominantly female problem, as many men are struck with the grim facial expressions. Only in women do we detect it more often because they are expected to always smile in a good mood. Do you want to know if you also have a “Resting Bitch Face”? Under “Test your RBF” you can have your photo analyzed.

photos: Tatyana Fazlalizadeh (3), Grumpy Cats (2)