Almost everyone arrives at a session having decided the wardrobe and not having thought about the face. Then the camera comes up and the only instruction anyone remembers is smile, so they do — and hold it, and keep holding it, and thirty frames later the mouth is doing something the eyes stopped agreeing with a while ago. Expression is the part of a headshot that people notice last and judge first. It is also the only part that can't be fixed afterwards.

Why a held smile reads as anxious

A real smile is an event. It rises, peaks, and decays over a second or two, and the muscle around the eye — the one that produces crow's feet and narrows the eye slightly — fires along with the mouth. A commanded smile is a pose. The mouth goes into position and stays there, the eye muscle never engages at all, and after a few seconds the effort starts showing at the corners of the mouth as tension.

Viewers read that instantly without being able to name it. The photo doesn't look fake so much as strained — the standard reaction is that the person looks nervous, or like they'd rather be elsewhere. Which, in fairness, is often true.

The practical consequence is that a smile should be caught, not held. That's why a decent photographer talks through a session instead of counting down to a shutter: the goal is to say something mildly funny and shoot the two-second window after it, not to ask you to reproduce the result on command.

The test that costs nothing: hold your best smile in a mirror for ten seconds. Somewhere around second four it stops being a smile and becomes a shape you are maintaining. That moment is exactly what a held pose looks like in a photograph, and it is why the frames from the start of a set are usually better than the ones from the end.

The eyes do the work the mouth gets credit for

Cover the mouth on any headshot you like and the expression usually survives. Cover the eyes and it collapses. Almost everything we read as warmth, confidence or interest is happening in a narrow band across the face, and the mouth is mostly confirming it.

This is why "just relax your face" is bad direction. A completely still face isn't neutral — it's blank, and a blank face gets read as displeased, which is where the very common complaint I look angry when I'm not smiling comes from. The face has gone inert rather than calm.

What works instead is thinking something specific in the moment the frame is taken. Not a mood — a thought. Someone you're glad to see walking into the room. The thing you'd say to a client who just agreed to the proposal. It sounds like acting-class nonsense and it is the single most reliable technique there is, because it produces a small amount of genuine muscle tone around the eyes that no amount of instruction to the mouth can fake. The related session-day habits — what to do with the shoulders, the jaw and the hands — are in our headshot tips.

Where the photo lands decides the expression

There is no single correct headshot expression, which is why the advice on the internet contradicts itself. The right answer depends entirely on what the picture has to do.

LinkedIn and company profiles. Displayed at about 100 pixels across, in a feed, next to a name the viewer doesn't recognise. Subtlety is invisible at that size, so the expression needs to read at a glance: a light smile, eyes engaged, clear separation from the background. This is the one case where erring warm is correct — a LinkedIn headshot that's too neutral just looks like a passport photo in a feed.

Law, medicine, finance and consulting bios. Displayed larger, on a page someone has deliberately opened, usually while deciding whether to trust you with something. Here the brief shifts toward composure. A closed-mouth smile with engaged eyes is the standard for a reason — it reads as someone who is pleased to meet you and also handles serious things. A broad open smile on a litigation bio isn't wrong, but it is working against the page around it.

Actor submissions. Different job entirely. Casting isn't assessing whether you seem friendly; they're matching a face to a role and looking for something behind the eyes they can imagine in a scene. A pleasant smile actively closes that down — it answers the question before they've asked it. Commercial actor headshots allow more warmth than dramatic ones, and both are further from the corporate brief than most people expect. The full comparison is in corporate vs acting headshots.

Getting there in a twenty-minute session

A Mini session is 20 minutes, a Professional 45, an Executive two hours. Even the short one is long enough, because expression work doesn't take time — it takes about four things.

  • Say what the photo is for. Two seconds of context ("this is going on a law firm bio", "this is for commercial submissions") changes the entire direction of the session. Most people never mention it.
  • Shoot the range deliberately. Ask for a warm set and a straight set rather than hoping both turn up. Two distinct expressions cover almost every use; twelve near-identical ones cover one.
  • Reset between frames. Drop the face completely, exhale, then come back up. Fatigue is what makes the last frames of a long set worse than the first.
  • Don't watch the back of the camera after every shot. It's the fastest way to become self-conscious, and self-consciousness is visible.

Everything from the session comes back on a Google Drive link — every frame, unretouched and unculled, with the retouched selects following within 24 hours. That matters here more than anywhere else, because expression is the thing you're worst at judging about yourself in the moment. The frame you'd have deleted on the day is frequently the one three other people pick. Working out which one that is has its own method, in how to choose your headshot.

Frequently asked questions

Should I smile in a headshot?

For anything commercial — LinkedIn, a company page, a real estate listing, a conference programme — yes, usually. The photo is doing an approachability job and a closed-mouth smile or a light open one does it. For actor submissions the answer is often no, because casting is reading a face for what it can play rather than for how pleasant it is.

Why do I look angry when I'm not smiling?

Usually because the face has gone completely still rather than neutral. A resting face with nothing behind the eyes reads as flat, and viewers fill that in as displeasure. The fix is not to add a smile — it is to think something specific while the shutter fires, which restores the small amount of muscle tone around the eyes that makes a still face read as a person.

What is a Duchenne smile and can I fake one?

A Duchenne smile involves the muscle around the eye as well as the mouth, which is why it produces crow's feet and a slight narrowing of the eye aperture. Most people cannot fire that muscle voluntarily. You can get there indirectly, though — by genuinely being amused for a second — which is the whole reason photographers talk during a session instead of counting down.

Should I show teeth?

It depends on whether the smile is real, not on the teeth. A genuine open smile is warmer than a genuine closed one and works well at profile-picture size. A held open smile is the single most common way a headshot goes wrong, because the mouth cannot sustain the shape as long as a shoot takes. If in doubt, shoot both — the gallery costs you nothing extra.

How many different expressions should I get from one session?

Two or three distinct ones, not twelve slight variations. A warm one for profiles, a straighter one for anything formal, and for actors a third that is doing something more specific. Every frame from the session comes back on a Google Drive link, so the range exists whether or not you knew you wanted it on the day.