Concord, California has been named the happiest city in America by HouseFresh, a consumer website that promotes clean in-home air.
The study was based on Instagram smiles.
We compared both “happiness” and “smiliness” because not every smile indicates happiness, and not every happy person smiles. After all, plenty of perfectly happy men choose not to smile in selfies because they suffer from man selfie face (lips in, eyebrows up, earnest). And some of the world’s most successful people ration their smiles in favor of pouting like an actual sparrow (parting your lips slightly, like a baby bird waiting to be fed).
This facial recognition tool places numerical estimates on emotions based on characteristics and expressions. To work out the happiest cities and states, we used the FaceAPI happiness score, averaging all the scores in each location. For the smiliest cities and states, we considered that a face has a smile if its smile score was greater than 0.75. The locations were ranked by the percentage of people smiling.
Concord had a happiness score of 79.1 out of 100. In 74.4% of photos on Instagram, residents were smiling.
Concord was a major outlier. According to HouseFresh, the Golden State as a whole ranked dead last for smiley faces. It scored 38.37 out of 100. The smiliest state was Utah, which earned a score of 74.4 out of 100.
Read the analysis here.
Data and rankings were compiled by HouseFresh and do not reflect statistics on all cities.