Chrissy Teigen's Cry Face

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About

Chrissy Teigen's Crying Face refers to the emotional reaction of American fashion model Chrissy Teigen captured on camera as her husband and singer-songwriter John Legend gave an acceptance speech for the “Best Original Song” award at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards, which quickly went viral on Twitter as an exploitable template for reaction image and photoshopped parodies.

Origin

On January 11th, 2015, singer-songwriter John Legend and rapper Common were given the award for "Best Original Song" for the song "Glory" off the soundtrack for the 2014 historical drama film Selma. During the acceptance speech, Legend's wife Teigen was filmed crying while watching him speak (shown below).

Immediately after the speech, the Entertainment Weekly Twitter^[1] feed posted a screen-captured image of Teigen crying (shown below).

Spread

That evening, Twitter users began posting the photo of Teigen's face along with humorous captions about what could cause the expression (shown below).

Meanwhile, Teigen responded to the reaction by tweeting that she didn't have a chance to practice her "cry face" and noted that she had become "a meme" (shown below, left).^[3]^[4] Additionally, Teigen posted a photo in which she is shown posing with her husband while wearing cry faces on Instagram^[2] (shown below, right). Within 17 hours, the post gained over 102,000 likes.

On January 12th, 2015, Twitter user @JAndre_Oh^[5] posted a photoshopped mouth eyes version of the cry face image (shown below). In less than 24 hours, the tweet received more than 630 favorites and 130 retweets. In the comings days, several news sites published articles about Teigen's cry face, including NY Daily News,^[6] In Touch Weekly,^[7] E! Online,^[8] The Huffington Post,^[9] People^[10] and MTV News.^[11]

2016 Academy Awards

At the 88th Academy Awards ceremony on February 29th, 2016, Teigen was once again spotted cringing in the audience during a monologue segment featuring American comedian Sarah Silverman, a photograph of which promptly entered online circulation via Twitter (shown below). The earliest screenshot of Teigen's facial expression at the ceremony was tweeted by Elizabeth C.^[12] at 9:03 p.m. (EST), followed by a slew of similar tweets highlighting the model's reaction.

Within minutes, Teigen took note of her reaction photograph going viral on Twitter and responded via her Twitter account^[13] by clarifying that she was actually reacting to American actor and Fox News commentator Stacey Dash's awkward on-stage gag, not Silverman's monologue.

Daughter's Recreation

On May 8th, 2019, Teigen tweeted^[15] a photograph of her husband John Legend holding their daughter, who appeared to be making a similar "crying" face. She captioned the post, "omg me." The tweet received more than 36,000 retweets and 439,000 likes in two days (shown below).

Following the post, people began posting memes and comparisons of the two reactions. Twitter^[16] tweeted the two side-by-side with the caption "I see no difference." The tweet received more than 3,900 retweets and 23,000 likes in two days (shown below, left). Twitter user @_rallycap tweeted^[17] a photoshopped image of Teigen's daughter's headphones on Teigen. The post received more than 540 retweets and 11,000 likes (shown below, center).

Throughout the next few days, others shared the tweet, captioning it with various jokes about anxiety (example below, right).