RIP The Millennial Smile: Gen Z Wants You To Stop Posing Like That

First, they came for our skinny jeans, then they came for our side parts, made fun of our millennial pause, and even declared “lol” as outdated.

We fired back with powerful strikes, “Your shapeless baggy clothes make you look like my brother,” “Lol, you don’t know how to write in cursive,” and general attacks against their struggle to socialize, date, and touch grass. The Gen Z stare alone was enough of a morale killer to keep them quiet for several months. But now they’re back, hungry for Millennial blood, and they’ve discovered a fresh millennialism to obliterate your social aura and burden you with a new self-consciousness: the way we pose for photos.

As an impartial Zillennial, I come bearing intel. TikToker Jasmine Adisbeth is the Millennial whistleblower who took to the platform with new information in tow: Zoomers are making fun of Millennials for the way they smile and pose in photos. Apparently, there’s a quirk among Millennials where they pose for pictures with demure smiles—half-smirking, half-smiling with their eyes, but not showing their teeth.

This humble pout, as The Daily Mail calls it, consists of a “slightly duckish, lips-thrust-forward, wide-eyed, precisely calibrated pose immortalized in 2010 selfies across Instagram and Facebook.” The New York Post compares the coy smile to a less intense version of Ben Stiller’s Blue Steel pout in Zoolander. It’s a Millennial trademark we didn’t know we had.

I’m taking this blow personally, mainly because it never occurred to me you could pose for a photo in any other way. They’ve come for me directly, and I may never recover. So why are Millennials (and elder Zoomers like me) so reluctant to “bare a toothy grin” in a traditional smile—or, as seems to be popular with young Zoomers, to stare deadpan into the camera with a flat affect? I’m not entirely sure, but I think we can trace Tyra Banks back to the scene of the crime.

One user commented on Jessica’s viral TikTok, “We are smizing like Tyra Banks told us to lol.” In the early aughts, America’s Next Top Model had young Millennial girlies in a chokehold. While the show is viewed in retrospect as a campy hot mess filled with questionable direction, one of Tyra Banks’ signature pieces of advice during photoshoots with the models was to “smize.” Could it be that this advice is so deeply embedded in our muscle memory that we can’t let it go? Not “smizing” was the difference between being the next CoverGirl and being eliminated.

Okay, but if it’s cringe to do a subtle smirk in a highly posed photo, then what are we supposed to do instead? Zoomers have developed an aesthetic preference for candid photography over contrived photography—the kind that dominated early Instagram. In the 2010s, you posted your most pristine, curated photos on Instagram with a highly selective hand. Instagram posting was serious business. Like, block-out-your-whole-afternoon serious business, because we needed to decide which photo was the one.

There were no low-effort “photo dumps” in those days, which risked collapsing your feed into Facebook album energy. As a consequence, our feeds were highly sterile and fake, yet aesthetically pleasing in a kind of “we’re taking official photos” sort of way. The flip side was that they were also stressful and brought down everyone’s vibe.

God forbid you posted an unflattering photo of your friend’s side profile in the corner. The aesthetics were more intentional and clean but also gave way to more neuroticism among young women who felt pressure to optimize everything—to take the perfect photos with perfect editing in the ideal location, displaying their perfect little lives.

The vibe has come full circle today, though, with Zoomers opting for candid-coded authenticity, or at least the appearance of it. Their photos are mid-movement candids, batches of photos that give off the vibe that they didn’t spend too much time thinking about them, and, most peculiarly, photos that are purposely of such underwhelming quality that they look like they were taken or posted (or both) by accident. Facially, Zoomers seem to flex a vacant-eyed stare of apathy in their photos because, well, caring isn’t cool.

If you ask me, the naturalistic photography style is an upgrade from the days when we took our shots a little too seriously and drove everyone around us crazy trying to get one perfect shot. Young people aren’t just dumping random photos on the feed—they’re telling a story, giving you a little glimpse into their lives. But the put-on air of apathy feels a little gratingly performative, so while I’m fully open to updating my photography style, I’ll be clinging to my faint Millennial-esque smirk over the dead-eyed stare any day.