Pretty sure we are the only animals with pink rings around our mouth. It’s flipping weird.
It probably helps with verbal language understanding as humans often use mouth movements to interpret words (see McGurk effect). But I still think it’s weird.
Big pink rings.
Evolutionarily, it probably helps with both speech and nonverbal language, i.e. facial expressions
Yeah that’s my guess. Since we use language so much and are social. It would help to make facial cues like the mouth shape, more visible.
I speculated that lighter skinned people have more pink lips and are generally thinner, compared to darker skinned because darker skinned people generally have larger lips, which would make up for any visibility loss from less contrast.
Humans just really need to see what shape the mouth is at any given moment.
That’s kinda weird too even if it makes sense.
My understanding is that focus on the mouth in social interactions is also influenced by culture. That’s why some cultures generally represented a happy face with the emoticon
:)while others used^_^The former is focused on the mouth and the eyes lack meaningful expression, while the latter is the opposite.