Tyra Banks Releases New Smize Yourself! App, Makes Making Faces Even More Fun

Life lessons learned from watching America’s Next Top Model…

1. If you think you can watch “just one episode” of that 8-hour Top Model marathon, fugghetabboutit.
2. Don’t forget to “pop the hip.” (Side note: Miss J’s hip control? Off the chain!)
3. And always, always remember to smile with your eyes.

Question: When can you tell that smiling with your eyes, or “smizing,” a term coined by model, TV show host and enterprising businesswoman Tyra Banks, has officially become a cultural phenomenon? Answer: when your 65-year-old mom calls to tell you that “you need to smize more often in your blog pictures.”

Well, can do, because smizing just got a whole lot easier. 🙂

Now, we can even smize ourselves on our phones!

Hello, is that fierceness calling?

Ty-Ty plans to smize you up, literally, with her latest venture, a new mobile phone app called Smize Yourself! (exclamation mark included).

On a Skype call with bloggers and reporters yesterday, Tyra described the $1.99 app, which launched last night (it’s available in the iTunes App Store now, but I’m not sure about Android availability).

You can smize an existing pic of yourself on your smartphone, or snap a new one with your phone’s camera. The app does the rest, turning you into an exaggerated smizing version of yourself.

Tyra provides an instructional video in the app on the finer points of smizing and rocks some seriously stunning smokey eyes.

When you’re ready to smize, take a pic of yourself, and listen as Tyra cheers you along with catwalk catchphrases like “Work!” and “Honey, you look fierce!” Wait for the app to automatically place eye and mouth points on your picture, and then adjust the location of the points to suit the shape of your face. When you’re ready, hit the “smize” button, and await your customized smize shot.

You can save your pics for posterity in a special smize album…

It’s just a little silly fun. But be warned: if your cat challenges you to a smize-off, you stand absolutely no chance. Cats will always win.

You can download the Smize Yourself! app now for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, and it’s available now for $1.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Beauty fun fact: Tyra’s a big fan of using Milk of Magnesia as a primer and calls it one of her secret weapons during her modeling days.

Tyra says that her first forays into smizing happened at home, and she credits her mom as being “the original smize-r.”

She says that her mom also copied the look of model Twiggy’s big lashes by drawing “twiggies,” or fake lashes, directly on Tyra’s bare skin. “Mom would do that to me in the house just for fun,” she says, “so that was my early smizing.” 🙂

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

P.S. TGIF!