One of my grandchildren sent me a self-portrait(自画像) she created for her art class. The top half of the portrait shows her hair parted in the middle with her big brown eyes looking through her glasses.
The bottom half of the self-portrait is a bright blue facemask with colourful flowers. It is a clever art project with the facemask as a cover. The mask is removable(可去掉的), but we received her picture with the mask on.
Her eyes looked a bit confused. Who hasn't looked confused in recent months? Luckily, I think I know what the problem is. The child needs to work on her smize.
Fashion model Tyra Banks created the term "smize" several years ago. A smize is a combination of smile and eyes, meaning to smile with your eyes. Models can make their eyes smile without moving their mouths.
Smizing is big right now. It's hard to show friendliness when the smiling half of your face is covered. Restaurants are even teaching wait staff to perfect the smize behind facemasks.
You can smize by scrunching(使收缩) up your eyes and using your cheeks to push your eyes up to create a smiling effect. It's hard to do, but you can learn how to do it by practicing in front of a mirror.
Like most people, I can wear my mask and smile at the same time, but my eyes can't smile without my mouth. They have an unbreakable bond.
Too bad we often can't see one another smiling these days because smiling is like yawning-highly contagious(传染的). Smiling and kindly acknowledging on another as fellow human beings wouldn't be the worst thing to sweep the nation. Go ahead, smize or smile, whatever you can do. Spread it around.
