This Facial Expression Is A Clue That Someone Is Flirting With You, Research Finds

Try to picture a flirty smile. What do you see?

The team based their research on the Facial Action Coding System, which looks at 23 distinct facial movements and their associated emotions. The goal was to figure out which cues indicated a woman was flirting and which facial expressions men interpreted as being flirty.

They took nearly 500 photos of women making happy, neutral, or flirtatious facial expressions, coded all these different expressions using the FACS, and then presented the photos to dozens of men to interpret.

Some women were more effective than others at making this flirty face, the researchers noted, and some men were better at recognizing it. But overall, the researchers described this combination of features as "highly recognized flirtatious expressions."

"We found most men were able to recognize a certain female facial expression as representing flirting," study co-author and psychology professor Omri Gillath, Ph.D., said in a news release. "It has a unique morphology, and it's different from expressions that have similar features—for example, smiling—but aren't identified by men as flirting expression."

Once they identified these factors, the team did additional research on the effects of this flirtatious smile. Men who'd seen this particular expression were more attuned to words related to sex, suggesting it's not only recognizable as a flirty look but also effective at making people think about sex.

"For the first time, not only were we able to isolate and identify the expressions that represent flirting, but we were also able to reveal their function—to activate associations related to relationships and sex," Gillath notes.