About Ashleigh McKenna
After first subscribing to sweetspot.ca to get to know her new city, Ashleigh McKenna now gets to help find the sweet stuff worth sharing as Editor and General Manager. Go behind the scenes from favourite manicure spots to product sneak peeks and more.
Written All Over Your Face
parties and personalities Toronto
(Feb.19.09)
I wear glasses. It's not a particularly stand-out statement about myself but the problem is I so often forget it when it seems to count.
After years of perfect vision and finally succumbing to my near-sightedness in university, I straddle the line between full-time glasses wearer and a girl who just squints a lot.
Why not constant contacts? I usually wear my glasses to get to work, take them off at the computer, put them back on if I'm watching TV and then off again to read or meet up with friends.
Which is exactly what I did last week to celebrate 5 years of The Drake Hotel. It, in the words of Stephania, seemed like a good idea at the time. Friends who go places with me are one thing. I can usually hone in on them in a crowd. It's anybody else that I might recognize (and normally smile and say hi to) that I wind up staring at blankly from across the room.
One friend even confessed that she didn't warm to me until the second time we met. Apparently I didn't return her eye contact through the lecture group at our introduction.
We all know that first impressions matter. But it turns out our looks may actually betray our personalities, or at least how people perceive us. And lucky (or not?) for me, it has nothing to do with eye contact.
A recent article from
New Scientist (sent my way via a Toronto writers listserv) looks at the idea of facial features and the revelation of character.
According to it, not only do we come to personality conclusions within a tenth of a second, but we also make a surprising number of similar assumptions per face. The story goes into great detail (especially about whether this actually matches up to who we are), but 70 per cent of the people polled identified a composite face in the clip below as "lucky."
I wouldn't have caught that. But maybe I just need to wear contacts.