The Bambi, finger-mouthing, Barbie feet, The Sugar-Cookie the ‘Cool Girl’ spread, the thot-squat and ribcage bragging. Not sex positions as it turns out, but Instagram poses that you've probably at some point tried to contort yourself into (no judgement, I am one of you).
Welcome to the latest one to try and get your head around: the Daily Mail have dubbed it The Shmile. It involves shutting your eyes and grinning at the camera with a full-toothed grin (shut eyes + smile = shmile, get it?), and you'll want to hear about it because it's predicated to be the biggest Instagram trend of 2019. It's viral-popularity has been attributed to the fact it makes you look relaxed, carefree - while evening out the forehead wrinkles and lines around the side of your face. (Something we have to wonder about, given it's mostly being deployed by twenty-year old women who don't have wrinkles, then again Botox is on an endemic rise with young women.)
You might have already seen the likes of Hailey Baldwin, Tammy Hembrow and Ashy Bines sporting it on their feeds. Underneath her post Hailey wrote 'I want to be more open about the things I struggle with, and be able to be more vulnerable' and 'no matter how amazing life may look from the outside I struggle.'
The shmile is cute, off beat and harmless-seeming: in line, actually with everything about the way that Instagram is steering towards making influencers seem more accessible, more like people like you or me (a ploy that the Kardashian's have profited heavily from by trying to sell things like spot cream and flat tummy shakes like they don't have celebrity facialists and personal trainers on hand to tweak their already flawless appearances).
While the celeb and influencer aesthetic used to signal elitism: pouts punchy enough to cause black eye, Insta-popularity is now built upon something much more sinister. The new aspirational is to be 'goofy' 'natural' and 'quirky and to reveal your foibles, to be transparent. But doesn't the fact that there's now been a pose invented to achieve this...well, point to the exact opposite?
There's an honesty to the over-produced Instagram post. We all know how long it actually takes to replicate the ‘plandid’ look of your friend teetering in the Manchester Hilton corridor balancing a glass of wine with the caption #wokeuplikethis. You were there, you took the 70 other photos that didn't make the cut. But the point is we all know that. We're all in on it, it's the worst kept secret on the planet. It's a sort of open deceit.
The problem with the rise of 'Shmiling' style instagram behavior is that it's not open or honest. The tyranny of the 'casual' pose is that it's not casual at all. It's just another step into the realms of unattainable standard of beauty. And teenage girls are the most vulnerable to it -43% of girls aged 15spend one to three hours on social media a day and research suggestsit's fuelling anxieties about their appearance due to comparisons they make with the women that they follow.
It's a further constraint upon us, demanding women to look perfect even in our pyjamas with no make-up on after three days of eating pizza and binge-watching back episodes of Suits. (Reality check: we don't, we never will and that's ok. It's ok to be gross) The shmile is another step into insta-deceit and we need to start making a clear and meaningful distinction between real and false on instagram. Not just a tokenistic one that fuels the problem.