People are only just realising what chin dimples really are – and they’re horrified
WE all get them when we screw up our faces, but what exactly are chin dimples and why do they appear?
Vlogger and science enthusiast Hank Green has offered an explanation – but most people wish he’d kept it to himself.
TikTok users were “disturbed” to learn that they are in fact caused by slightly scary-looking facial muscles below the mouth which poke into the skin.
Replying to a guy who showed off his own chin dimples and asked: “What is this thing?”, Green told his 7.5million followers the answer was simple.
“You have correctly identified a weird muscle, well done,” he said.
“Almost every muscle in your body connects a bone to another bone.
“Your bones yank on each other and that’s how you move.
“There are other muscles, like sphincters, that just yank on themselves.
“The heart is a totally different kind of muscle that also yanks on itself to pump your blood around.”
Green, 43, explained that things work a little differently in the face.
The internet star continued: “In our faces, we have a bunch of muscles that do not connect to other bones and you can tell this right?
“All the movement that faces do so that we can talk and emote and stuff – we’re not yanking on bones here, we’re yanking on skin.”
Author Green, from Alabama, then explained that the paired muscle in the chin – the mentalis muscle – connects bone to skin, hence the little marks when you flex it.
“You can see the mentalis here, doing an absolutely wild thing, sticking all of its little muscle fibres into your skin”, he added, sharing a photo of the “tentacles” protruding from the skull.
“When you contract that muscle, it yanks on your skin and makes those little dimples.
“It’s a little weird. We’re all made out of meat.”
Viewers were stunned by Green’s “horrifying” explanation of the mentalis muscle, sometimes referred to as the pouting muscle.
‘I AM UNCOMFORTABLE’
One said: “I am uncomfortable with what is in me and there is nothing I can do about it.”
Another simply wrote: “I don’t think I wanted to know this.”
A third commented: “Where do I click to unsee this?”
And a fourth said: “This makes me want to throw up so hard.”
But others were slightly more positive about learning something new.
One said: “I literally thought it was because I had acne.
“Thank you for normalising this.”
According to experts at Aesthetics Life, a dimpled chin develops when the mentalis muscle, which “inserts with several fibres in the dermis of this area, is contracted.
“This can lead to the appearance of wrinkles or a ‘pin cushioning’ effect on the chin,” a spokesperson said.
“Eventually, the appearance occurs even at a rested stage as we get older.”