I know a stroke can cause this but I’ve met a lot of people who I suspect never had one that have either crooked mouths or when they speak it seems their mouths are almost on the side of their mouths. I have a co worker whose mouth seems to be almost on one side of his face when he speaks.
The most notable example to me is actress Ellen Barkin. I’ve tried to investigate any medical issues but all roads lead to snarky comments about recent plastic surgery.
Milo Ventimiglia, Natalie Dormer, John Mayer also seem to have as the paparazzi would say “crooked smiles”.
Is this an actual medical phenomena or just something that happens aka no one is 100% symmetrical…there’s just some more asymmetrical than others.
Not judgy here: if you saw my face there’d be a lot you could ask about!
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My son spent the last 400 months of pregnancy with his face pushed as hard as possible into my pelvis (and his feet into my ribs). When he was born, he had nerve damage from the position he was in. When he smiled, he looked like Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes. As he grew, it essentially disappeared.
Shorter version - it may be nerve damage, and nerve damage can come from all kinds of sources.
My daughter has asymmetric crying facies, a congenital one-sided absence or weakness of the muscles that pull the lower lip down. It has become less noticeable over time, but she still has a crooked smile, with the left side of her mouth being more mobile. It affects roughly 1 in 150 children, most frequently because of birth trauma but sometimes as part of a genetic condition associated with other anomalies.
I’m assuming this is a whoosh, but in the spirit of GQ, would you mind please clarifying? I’d hate to have someone drop in and get the wrong idea – it wasn’t obvious to me on first read.
Not a lot of people advertise this. There are a handful, such as George Clooney, but not a lot.
I also think some people just do it. Drew Barrymore somewhat famously talks out of the side of her mouth. When smiling, this is commonly known as a “smirk,” and I think some people just smile that way. You might as well ask why some people have “resting b_tch face”. Some people just do.
I suffered from Bell’s palsy for a few months, twenty years ago, and I absolutely had a lopsided smile for that time. Thankfully, it cleared up with no lingering effects, but I know several people who had cases of it in which the effects never entirely went away, and it did lead to smiling / talking more from one side of their mouths.
Additionally, I had a teacher in grade school who had a similar lopsided mouth; hers was the result of suffering a stroke.
Taking a look at pictures of her from the 1980s, in many of the pictures, it does look like the left corner of her mouth had a little downturn that the right corner didn’t. As to why that was, I still have no idea.
