Why Do Our Faces Turn Bright Red at the Exact Moment We Wish We Could Disappear?

This is Book Outtakes, a new series of brief essays featuring research the author did for their book, that then didn't make it into their book.

It’s so often infuriating, living inside a human body. My skin, for instance, flushes at the slightest embarrassment—and not just my face, but my neck, my chest and sometimes my arms, too. In the very moment I want to disappear, my body turns me into a pink glow stick. It was a mystery I felt so determined to solve that I wrote an entire book about it, sort of: Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness is a non-fiction look at the science that helps explain awkwardness, self-consciousness, and embarrassment. For my research, I read extensively on blushing, though most of those pages ended up being the darlings I eventually had to kill; what follows is an overview of what I learned about this intriguing, annoying physiological phenomenon.

Charles Darwin was intrigued by blushing, calling it “the most peculiar and the most human of all the expressions.” You can make a person laugh by tickling them, he mused, and you can make them cry by beating them. Yet there isn’t a reliable way to make someone else—or yourself, for that matter—blush. The blood that rushes to your face arrived there under orders of the sympathetic nervous system, and as such is an automatic, involuntary response to shame or embarrassment. What could be the evolutionary point of this uncontrollable physiological response, when it leaves you so visible, so vulnerable?

In one study, for instance, researchers asked people to embarrass themselves by singing a children’s song in front of the experimenters. “Surprisingly,” they note, “increases in cheek temperature were greater on the observed than on the unobserved side when participants sang.” In other words: The study authors claim that if the audience was on the person’s left, their left cheek blushed more; if they were on the right, the right cheek blushed more.

“Blushing is not only involuntary,” as Darwin noted in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, “but the wish to restrain it, by leading to self-attention, actually increases the tendency.”

Studies on erythrophobia, or the fear of blushing, have confirmed this, suggesting that the people who hate blushing the most tend to be those who are more highly self-focused; they are deeply tuned into their own bodies, and as such, they feel themselves blush before an observer notices. Erythrophobics also tend to hold themselves to strict social standards. “For example,” write the authors of one paper on the subject, “they were asked to imagine that they ordered a dessert whereas no one else in their party did, or that they appeared in leisure wear at a formal party.” Those who were most afraid of blushing were also more likely to be horrified by these relatively mild breaches of social norms. Including, presumably, their constant blushing.

But this stands in contrast to the way we interpret a blush in others; some studies in social psychology have suggested that when a person blushes after committing some sort of transgression, it redeems them in others’ eyes; it increases others’ perception of their trustworthiness. Because if a blush really is uncontrollable, then that also means it’s genuine. So maybe, then, the pink glow stick effect is exactly how blushing is supposed to work. Maybe it’s a signal we send to each other, the body’s tacit apology for its owner stepping out of line: That was weird. I know that was weird. I’m sorry that was so weird. And this isn’t just my theory: In 2012, a study by UC Berkeley psychologists arrived at the same conclusion. Outward signs of embarrassment, these researchers argue, function as “a signal of prosociality and commitment to social relationships.” We tend to trust people who are visibly red-faced over something silly they did. We tend to like them, too. From this perspective, my own body’s insistence on blushing isn’t so infuriating. Chances are, others find it kind of endearing.

• 0