Resting Bitch Face

About

Resting Bitch Face, also known as Bitchy Resting Face, refers to an involuntary relaxed facial expression that is incorrectly interpreted by others to signal anger, sadness or contempt.

Origin

On August 18th, 2009, Urban Dictionary^[12] user supersrs submitted an entry for “RBF,” defining it as an initialism for the “resting bitch face” involuntary facial expression.

Spread

On April 1st, 2011, Urban Dictionary^[5] user miisty submitted an entry for “resting bitch face,” defining it as a person “who naturally looks mean when her face is expressionless.” On July 6th, 2012, the pop culture blog Thought Catalog^[14] published an article titled “The Overthinker’s Guide to Resting Bitchface Syndrome.” On April 29th, 2013, Funny Or Die^[13] posted a public service announcement parody video titled “Bitchy Resting Face,” in which several people lament having a default facial expression that makes them appear angry or upset (shown below). In the first two years, a YouTube upload of the video gained over 6.2 million views and 3,200 comments.

On June 11th, 2013, Redditor deep-friend submitted the “Bitchy Resting Face” sketch to the /r/videos^[1] subreddit, where it gathered more than 2,700 votes (89% upvoted) and 1,600 comments prior to being archived. On June 30th, a Facebook^[2] page titled “Resting Bitchface Syndrome – RBS” was launched, which accumulated upwards of 5,300 likes in the next two years. On July 4th, Urban Dictionary^[4] user Loobergs submitted an entry for “bitchy resting face,” defining it as “bitchy alternative to the usual blank look.” On April 17th, 2014, Redditor DandurlyDarry submitted a photograph of his cat titled “My cat has resting bitch face” to the /r/aww^[11] subreddit, where it received upwards of 2,500 votes (92% upvoted) prior to being archived.

On May 15th, the /r/RestingBitchFace^[3] subreddit was launched for photographic examples of the facial expression. On June 21st, actress Anna Paquin from the television drama series True Blood discussed suffering from “bitchy resting face” during her appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live (shown below).

On November 9th, BuzzFeed^[7] published a listicle titled “22 Things That Only Happen To People Who Have Resting Bitchface,” which gained over 3.2 million views in the following year. On February 26th, 2015, Thought Catalog^[8] published an article titled “11 Signs You Have Chronic Resting Bitch Face.” On May 16th, actress Anna Kendrick appeared as a guest on The Late Show with James Corden, in which she expressed her displeasure with having “resting bitch face.”

On June 19th, the tech news site Motherboard^[9] published an article titled “‘We Don’t Trust People with a Bitchy Resting Face,” which cited a newly released study^[6] by NYU psychology researchers on how different facial expressions are interpreted.

Various Examples

Smiling Gives You Wrinkles

Smiling Gives You Wrinkles is an image macro series featuring photographs of women wearing blank facial expressions accompanied by the caption “Smiling gives you wrinkles / Resting bitch face keeps you pretty” (shown below). On October 2nd, 2014, the women’s interest blog XoVain^[10] published an article titled “Does Having Resting Bitch Face Prevent Premature Aging?”, which highlighted an example featuring a picture of actress Vivian Leigh (shown below, right).