Duck pouts and rawr faces: How facial expressions became trends

‘Girls don’t do this face anymore’, the post on X is accompanied by an image of MySpace royalty, Hayley Williams and Brody Dalle, grimacing in an expression that once defined a generation. This sneering, angsty, and slightly quirky look encapsulated the zeitgeist of now-millennial teens who grew up toggling between MySpace profiles and Hot Topic changing rooms. And if you could see beneath their side-swept bangs and heavy eyeliner, scene kids across the world were all snapping pics with the same upturned expression.

While this sneer might now be just a faint muscle memory for thirty-somethings, it’s part of a lineage of facial trends that are timestamps for generations gone by. Our obsession with self-documentation has unintentionally created a digital archive of these generational trends: poses like the duck face – the exaggerated pout and hollow-cheeked expression of the late 2000s – or the signature expressionless deadpan stares of the 2020s – made famous by people like Chloe Cherry and photographer Stolenbesos – have come to hallmark entire time periods. Then, as trends change and the next generation grows up, these expressions, once captured in teenage bedrooms and shared en masse online, sink to the saturated depths of Instagram grids.

These facial expression trends are communicative of the emotions that came to define generational zeitgeists, according to Dr Jason Deska, an associate professor of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University. The absurdity of the duckface pout was telling of a time where social presentations online weren’t taken too seriously. In the same way, Gen Z’s parodying smirks complement their irony-clad captions and self-referential reposts. While Gen Alpha’s obsession with self-optimisation, whether through anti-ageing products or avatar customisation in games like Roblox and Among Us, has given rise to trending facial expressions like mogging and mewing.

For the most part, internet eras are fairly recognisable through the memes that register the humour and attitudes of the time. While memes of bygone eras may still crop up online occasionally, whether innocently shared by a relative on WhatsApp or in a deep-fried post-ironic rendition, their dissonance in the current landscape of the internet is easy to notice. In the same way, facial expressions like a duckface feel particularly out of place online today. This is because the nature of these expressions mirrors the textual and image-based memes of their time. When the sneering e-girls of the MySpace era were posing online, their chat boxes and comment sections filled with ‘rawr’ and ‘xD’, text shorthand for the same angst and quirkiness their expressions, the music they were listening to and the art they were creating embodied.

Whether it’s the peace signs and finger guns of the bisexual community, the lip-biting of 2014 Vine boys and 2023 Hey Mamas lesbians, or the Kubrick stare of the succubus chic it-girls, these visual markers serve as a shorthand for social belonging. Dr Deska explains that generations come to be defined by a facial expression due to mimicking. “Mimicking often has a negative connotation, but it plays a vitally important role in social communication,” he adds. This mimicry, whether intentional, ironic or not, occurs when we seek to align ourselves with a particular social circle. In the same way that the Chelsea haircuts of skinheads in the 80s or the Sambas and Brazil jersey uniform of the summer of 2024 indicated membership of certain social groups or generations, our expressions provide information about who we are, what we are interested in and the people we are trying to be aligned with. The same can be said of the slang we use, the music we listen to and even the hand gestures we make – think the difference between how millennials and Gen Z make a heart sign with their hands.

And then, just as digital memes and fashion styles fall out of favour, so do popular facial expressions fade away and become passé as the next trend rises. “We hit some critical threshold for certain expressions where we start to see it everywhere,” says Dr Deska. “It becomes oversaturated and is no longer cool or trendy”. It’s the same way that when brands and parents start using meme phrases, says Deska, they ultimately become “uncool”. “Whatever the next trend is comes along and the cycle begins anew.”

Thanks to face-centric social media platforms like TikTok, the trend cycle of facial fads is more accelerated than ever. While the duck face had us in a chokehold from at least 2007 to 2015, these days expressions come and go much more quickly and almost as soon as they rise, they are already being parodied – think the cliché of the chin-stroking, smooth-talking ‘fuckboy’.

And now, in the age of AI filters and augmented reality, these trends are evolving yet again. With the abundance of filters across platforms, there’s less need to organically create these expressions. Instead, filters themselves are now categorising the expressions of generations: think the 2016 Snapchat dog filter or 2023’s Bold Glamour. Like the expressions, these filters act as indicators that instantly date an image, for better and sometimes for worse, as proven by the TikToker user who recently shared that the only pictures she has of her child born in 2016 are ones with filters, from flower crowns to dog ears. Once the height of trendiness, these filters now make the pictures look ancient and passé, a fate that will inevitably come for all of our favourite expressions and gestures one day.