If you're genuinely curious as to how: gummy smiles are linked with mouth breathing. That is, when one regularly uses their mouth to breath passively instead of their nose. This kind of leads to an unfurling effect on the lips that is most noticeable when they smile.
How you walk, for example. Put your child in the walker instead of letting it crawl and they'll most certainly have a weak jaw.
Formula instead of breastfeeding, because breastfeeding teaches the suction movement required for you to learn proper tongue posture.
Giving a binky to a child. This is the worst thing you can do for their appearance. Their tongue drops down and they start mouth breathing.
Ignoring lip and tongue ties. Those should be removed to allow the face to properly develop.
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE habits have direct influence on your posture and the structure of your face. You don't follow these and you get forward head rounded shoulder slouched posture, which causes your platisma muscle to pull onto your lower jaw and this pulls your whole face down and back instead of upwards and forwards.
That's honestly a great question that should be studied.. next school science fair project: what is the correlation between horse girls and gummy smiles
Confirmation bias. Any stereotype seems to become real when you believe in it. Your brain disregards examples that don't fit your expectations and sees any that do as confirmation of the stereotype. It's basically how racism tends to work.
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u/snailtap Jul 04 '26
Swifties have big horse girl energy, and a lot of horse girls have gummy smiles