Is a very annoying habit that became a meme in the late 2010s as a riff on the soy boy meme.
You've probably seen this. If you watch certain hardware focused Youtube channels, the thumbnails are awash with it. If you post on Faceache or Twatter or Instacrap, and someone you know has recently acquired something, you've probably seen it. It's sometimes referred to a bugman mouth or the Soylent Grin. If you feel the need to ransack your dignity by doing it, don't. Seriously, don't.
The soy face is where a person takes a selfie holding up an item of consumer goods in one hand, and with their face they have their eyes staring at the camera, and their mouth all the way open while grimacing and smiling and showing their teeth as much as possible while trying to look ungodly excited for it. Basically, it is grown men (and it is always men, probably because most women are too sensible to do this) acting like a small child who has recently been given a new toy train, and wants to show it off to the world, and show off how incredibly and over the moon excited they are for it. So, the soy face.
It's a thing that's associated with male feminists according to the greater online received wisdom, possibly because by regressing to a childish turn of behaviour, they are trying to signal feverishly how not a threat they are. If they were just photographing something they've acquired that they like without context, or with a chin-stroking gesture of approval, this is, well, too stoic and traditionally manly for these people, in their minds. But, if they act like a child, they can prove they're Not Like Other Guys. It's also popular with YouTubers because the algorithm apparently rewards the channel owner's face being in the thumbnail, and visible or purported excitement or strong emotion. Combined with a clickbait title like "New iPhone 16 XRS GTO Fuckslayer Edition DECIMATES Android Shitphones!" with the channel owner holding up said product, doing soy face punts the video to the top of the standings and ensures that lazy people just wanting to look into whether they should spend their hard earned cash on buying a new phone that does nothing their existing one doesn't that they will actually use will consume this content first. Meanwhile, the channels by people who know what they're about and do the graphs and the hard work of objective testing and suchlike, in a sober and objective way? Nope. That's considered boring by young people today. (Ugh. Zoomers. My fellow millennials are bad enough, but zoomers are incomprehensible as well as attention-crabbed. And they're shit at tech but that's a writeup for another day).
Associated is the soyjack which is a variant of Wojak but with a scraggly beard, balding, and with a wide open mouthed grimace, or similar line drawing variants of people actually doing the soy face.
I'll leave it there. Put simply, if you are a content creator or influencer with nothing original or good to say, keep doing this so I know to shun your material. If you are anyone else, please don't do this because it's neither big nor clever.
(IRON NODER 2023 #20)