Guide To Flirting | Page 7

In experiments, female hair-flipping and head-tossing were
among the (non-contact) gestures most often regarded as sexually flirtatious, along with repeated
leg-crossing and movements designed to draw attention to the breasts.
Facial expression
An ability to ‘read’ and interpret the facial expressions of your partner will improve your chances
of successful flirting, as will awareness of what you are signalling with your own expressions.
Some expressions can be effective even from a distance, as in the ‘across a crowded room’
encounter with a stranger. The ‘eyebrow-flash’, for example, which involves raising the eye-
brows very briefly – for about one-sixth of a second – is used almost universally as a long-
distance greeting signal. When you see someone you know, but are not near enough to speak, the
eyebrow-flash shows that you have noticed and recognised them.
We all use this non-verbal “Hello!” in situations where we cannot use the verbal equivalent,
either because of distance or social convention. Watch a video of Andrew and Fergie’s wedding,
for example, and you will see that Fergie performs frequent eyebrow-flashes as she walks down
the aisle. Social etiquette does not allow a bride to call out cheery greetings to her friends and
relations during the ceremony, but the highly sociable Fergie is clearly unable to refrain from
signalling the same greetings with her eyebrows.
If you are desperate to attract the attention of an attractive stranger across a crowded party, you
could try an eyebrow-flash. This should make your target think that you must be a friend or
acquaintance, even though he or she does not recognise you. When you approach, your target
may thus already be wondering who you are. You can, if you are skilful, use this confusion to
initiate a lively discussion about where you might have met before. Such conversations inevita-
bly centre on possible shared interests or friends or habits, and invariably involve mutual disclo-
sure of at least some personal information. As you will learn from the ‘Verbal flirting’ sections of
this Guide, these are essential ingredients of successful flirting. So, assuming your target finds
you attractive, an eyebrow-flash with appropriate follow-up could leapfrog you into instant

intimacy.
Two warnings are necessary here: 1) If your target does not find you attractive, the eyebrow-flash
strategy may backfire, as the confusion over whether or not you already know each other will be
experienced as unpleasant and annoying, rather than amusing. 2) Do not use the eyebrow-flash in
Japan, where it has definite sexual connotations and is therefore never used as a greeting signal.
If your target is attracted to you, this may be more evident in facial expressions than in words.
Studies have found that women are generally better than men at reading these expressions, but
that both sexes have equal difficulty in seeing through people’s expressions when they are con-
trolling their faces to hide their real feelings.
The problem is that although faces do express genuine feelings, any facial expression that occurs
naturally can also be produced artificially for a social purpose. Smiles and frowns, to take the
most obvious examples, can be spontaneous expressions of happiness or anger, but they can also
be manufactured as deliberate signals, such as frowning to indicate doubt or displeasure, smiling
to signal approval or agreement, etc. Feelings can also be hidden under a ‘social’ smile, a ‘stiff
upper lip’ or a blank, ‘inscrutable’ expression.
Despite this potential for ‘deceit’, we rely more on facial expressions than on any other aspect of
body language. In conversation, we watch our companions’ faces rather than their hands or feet,
and rely on their facial signals to tell us what effect we are having, and how to interpret what they
say. Although people are better at controlling their facial expressions than other aspects of body
language, there is still some ‘leakage’, and the following clues will help you to detect insincerity.
Let’s say your target smiles at you. How do you know whether this smile is spontaneous or
manufactured? There are four ways of telling the difference. First, spontaneous smiles produce
characteristic wrinkles around the eyes, which will not appear if your target is ‘forcing’ a smile
out of politeness. Second, ‘forced’ or ‘social’ smiles tend to be asymmetrical (stronger on the left
side of the face in right-handed people and on the right side of the face in left-handed
people).The third clue to insincerity is in the timing of the smile: unspontaneous smiles tend to
occur at socially inappropriate moments in the conversation (e.g. a few seconds after you have
made a funny remark, rather than immediately). Finally, there is a clue in the duration of the
smile, as a manufactured smile tends to be held for longer (what is often called a ‘fixed’ smile)
and then to fade in an irregular way.
When observing your target’s facial expressions, it is important to remember that although an
expressive face – showing amusement, surprise, agreement etc. at the appropriate moments –
may indicate that your target returns your interest, people do naturally differ in their degree and
style of emotional expression. Women naturally tend to smile more than men, for example, and
to