You mad bro?

Have you ever been approached by a stranger in the street saying:” smile!” or by a coworker, family member, friend to ask you “Why are you mad?”, only for you to respond that you are fine and that there is nothing wrong? If yes, you already know what this is about. If you don’t then you are about to find out.

Pretty sure it's just my face... But thanks for asking

Ladies and gentlemen today we are talking about the resting Bitch face or RBF (or Bitchy Resting Face; BRF). I am going to be totally honest with you: until recently I didn’t even know it was a thing or that there even was a name for unintentionally frowning your face and looking like you're about to punch somebody in the face. Yes that’s exactly what it is. And if you are "suffering" from that too I bet you find it very annoying when people walk to you a millions times a day to ask you what’s wrong with you, only to realize that your face is the only thing wrong. And I didn’t know how concerning it was until recently when I saw a picture of myself and my facial expression made me gasp.

Pretty accurate

I wanted to understand what the root cause of it was and also raise some awareness (not sure what I am raising awareness for but oh well...). So I looking up some stuff and it turns out that RBF is a “syndrome” (lol whatever that means). According to some of the findings I stumbled onto it is not people just throwing shades, it is not some angry girl being mad at you or some random guy trying to break you in half: it is a real thing. A real thing that Behavioral researchers Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth tried to explain using a face reader program. All in all, the software compares the face of a “normal” person and the face of someone with RBF using 500 points on theirs faces to analyze their expressions and detect signs of various emotions (expressed and hidden). According to the results published by the two researchers and mentioned in the Huffington Post “ The typical facial expression is mostly neutral with just 3 percent of different emotions hidden in it, including just a drop of contempt. In RBF, however, the level of emotion nearly doubles to 5.76 percent — with most of that increase in the form of contempt.”

                         

Stranger: Why so mad? * Me: No... really I'm not... mad... it's just my face 😩

And if you have ever seen Kanye’s, Kristen Stewart’s  or even Anna Kendrick’s faces at rest you can kind of sense that note of contempt. However, Macbetch noted that “the FaceReader is not detecting enough contempt to reflect true contempt because these faces are not actually displaying contempt” before adding that   “It just looks like contempt to the viewer. Thus, it is the perception of that unconscious, subtle contempt expression that defines RBF” [More information about the study here]

Anna Kendrick on twitter: "Is there a filter on Instagram that fixes Bitchy Resting Face? Asking for a friend"

The study also mentioned that even though RBF is more commonly associated to women, it also affects men. So next time you are tempted to ask somebody if the person is mad or pick a fight because you feel like the person is throwing shades, consider that it might only be the person’s face that is wrong and nothing else. For having RBF and knowing people who have that too (ndlr my dad and my mother), you just have to learn to work with it and know the difference between their “I am pissed off” face and  their "regular" face (replace regular by RBF)

I hope this article was helpful and don’t be scared of us people with RBF, we are [sometimes] great people with a freaking messed up face. So next time you see me say hi and I’m pretty sure you’ll see me smile ;)

Until next time,
xo