Hartford Residents Smile Less Than Almost Every Other City in America

Hey Hartford! WTF.....why the face?

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According to a new study from Shiny Smile, folks in Connecticut's Capitol have an attitude problem, or at least an attitude face. Shiny Smile used Instagram photos for the study and did a "manual analysis of the presence of smiling faces in 15,000 Instagram photos in 50 major U.S. cities."

Guess what? There are only three major cities in America that smile less than Hartford. Those cities are:

1 - Baltimore, MD -- Smile % of 28.6

2 - Providence, RI - Smile % of 31.4

3 - Detroit, MI - Smile % of 32.1

Then there is Hartford at 32.9% on the smile chart. What the hell CT? Why must we suck at even the simplest of things. You're here to tell me that people in Detroit smile almost the same as us? We need to work on that, a lot, quick.

So, lose the puss-face Hartford. Wait, can you say that?

SIDEBAR: Yes, you can. "Puss Face" comes from Irish term 'pus' meaning lips and mouth. The origin of "puss" meaning cat. Cats are bad, have bad attitudes = puss face.

Now, there is an opposite, happier side of the coin, the cities that smile the most, here are the Top 5:

1 - Cincinnati, OH - 57.3%

2 - Birmingham, AL - 53.6%

3 - Austin, TX - 53.2%

4 - Chicago IL - 51.9%

5 - Virginia Beach, VA - 51.5%

As upset as I am (not smiling) to see a CT perform so poorly on the list, I'm also glad we're not one of the more smiley cities. I don't like, respect or trust people that are always smiling. They are either up to something or missing vital parts of the brain that identify danger or badness in the world. LOL. I love that paragraph so much (smiling).

P.S. The study also shared a valuable hypothesis for people who aspire to be social media influencers. A well-centered, clear photo of a person smiling can push you to the top of the Instagram algorithm resulting in more people seeing your content. Less set aside the "well-centered" and "clear" pieces because those should be obvious. Content with a single smiling face performs better than one without a smile, performs better than pics if groups of people and performs better than inanimate objects.

P.P.S. I find these meaningless studies fascinating. They're all conducted by companies looking to get attention, so desperately that they'll invest thousands of dollars on studies that are a huge financial risk for them. They spend the thousands to make the study, thousands more making sure the results get to people like me. Then, the company sits back, praying the study catches fire somewhere in the media. People read the entire article, click back to the study, absorb every, single, word and then click back to the social media post they found it on and type "who cares?" Humans are weird.