EDITORIAL- Don’t say “cheese” for passport pics

The U.S. State Department doesn’t want you to show off your dazzling smile. As a matter of… The U.S. State Department doesn’t want you to show off your dazzling smile. As a matter of fact, Angela Aggeler, spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, said that smiling “distorts other facial features.”

Under new rules for visa photographs that began this summer, showing your teeth is grounds for a denied passport application. The new guidelines actually allow people to smile for passport and visa pictures, but toothy smiles are classified as unusual or unnatural expressions.

“The most neutral face is the most desirable standard for any type of identification,” Aggeler said.

The new guidelines state that the subject’s expression should be “neutral (non-smiling) with both eyes open, and mouth closed.”

A photograph of a person’s face is considered the international standard for a biometric, or physical, identifier. Last year, the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency that sets international aviation safety, announced standards for machine-readable passports, which would include physical characteristics that computers could use to confirm people’s identities, according to a Salon.com article.

Hopefully, these machine-readable passports will be issued more frequently than the current 10-year passports because most people don’t quite look the same at 26 as they did at 16. Thanks to color contact lenses, facial hair and hair dyeing, the picture could look like a totally different person. Add in the popularity of cosmetic surgery, and the sweet 16-year-old girl in the passport picture with long blond hair is now a redhead with collagen-enhanced lips on her way back from holiday in Europe just in time for a Botox appointment. Will it then matter whether or not she was showing off her unbleached teeth when the picture was taken?

Perhaps the security personnel found it too much of a task to ask people to smile if their pictures revealed some teeth. Who pleasantly approaches airport security anyway? It’s definitely more likely that a smile would freely be given to the local bartender who can spot fake identification a mile away anyway.

Don’t we want a “have a nice day” nation? Rejecting all the smiling applications just means flying the unfriendly-looking skies.

Of all the things for the U.S. State Department to set new guidelines for, smiling doesn’t need to be one of them.