Is it normal for your cheeks to hurt if you force a smile for an extended period of time?

i don’t think the cheeks would hurt because of that. it’s the jaw.

Sure it is. The muscles in your face are sore.

Stands to reason, you’re exerting the muscles in your face more than normal.
Does raise the question though, why were you pretending to be smiling.

You weren’t faking excitement over one of my answers were you, really there’s no need. But thanks anyway.

Yup, definitely has happened to me before; even after genuinely smiling for too long my cheeks will hurt.

Yep! Thats normal. You know what I hate?when you smile so much your mouth starts twitching while someone is taking a picture of you. I feel embarassed because I can’t control it!

Perfectly normal. I’ve experienced it when working in retail, restaurants tradeshows and recruitment fairs (sp?)

Very normal. My face hurt so bad during my wedding photos!

Normal and painful.

yep, it hurts quite a bit!

It hurts so good.

I was tripping on acid and laughed and giggled for 14 hours straight. My face was very very sore afterwards.

I was in agony after my wedding. My cheeks were on fire. It does go away fast though.

When I was very young, a teacher or a camp counselor or someone told my mother that she was concerned with me because I never seemed happy. My mother asked me about it and I said that something like it took too much energy to smile. What a weird kid I was!! (I smile a lot as an adult, btw.)

One of my college friends and I used “face hurting” as one test to tell if we genuinely liked a situation or not. If we were with people or at a job where we came home in pain from fake-smiling, we’d say, “my face hurts,” and we both knew what we meant.

Small-talk’ll do it every time.

It hurts to flex those muscles for a long period of time. I have experienced it at comedy shows where I am laughing for hours on end. Those muscles aren’t used to the workout. It is kind of sad. They, and my sides, hurt from something that feels that good. And, I wasn’t forcing it. We should all learn how to seriously work out our faces that way and get superbuff cheeks, eyes, lips, ears, etc.

Prom. 392840 pictures and incredibly sore. I tried to forget what a smile was for days.