Some of you have them and some of you don’t. I read somewhere that they can be considered a birth defect. But they’re extremely endearing, cute, and adorable. What are these things I speak of? Dimples!

I am one of the millions of people with dimples. I’ve had them for as long as I can remember. I think I got them from my dad. Dimples are genetically inherited, and they’re a dominant trait. I just learned that today, cause I was bored and decided I needed to learn more about dimples, of all things. These are the little things in life that we see a lot but don’t really know much about. We just accept that they’re there.

I wonder if animals can get dimples…

If my dad has them, then one of his parents must have had dimples, if not both, and then a grandparent somewhere would have had them. I have a long line of dimpled ancestors. But who was the first ancestor with dimples? It must have originated somehow in an ancestor where the parents didn’t have them, possibly.

These are the questions I ask myself, randomly, on a Wednesday morning. The mundane, boring little aspects of my life, the things that are overlooked, brushed aside, accepted as they are—all these things are up for grabs in my mind as topics of blog posts and further research projects. I love looking things up. It gets a bit crazy at times the things I can find on the Internet that I really shouldn’t be looking up. But I crave knowledge. I crave understanding. And I just have this inate need to know…well, everything that I can know. If it’s at all possible for me to find out what I want to know.

I love collecting things. And one of the things that I collect is information. That’s how I came across the dimple info. Of which I was not aware before. Seems strange that in all my 33 years I never thought to read about dimples.

Wonder what other things I should be reading about, that we see everyday, that we accept without really knowing or understanding what they are, how they are created, and why they are there. Paper, perhaps? Coffee? Staplers?

Getting back to dimples, in some cultures these can be a sign of attractiveness, of veracity. I’m not sure why. Maybe they make your face look more aligned. Or maybe it makes other people smile when they see dimples. I do feel a bit happier when I see someone smiling and they have very profound dimples. I bet that’s it. Dimples are infectious smile makers.

I can think of a few friends who have dimples, but I’d have to look at pictures to see if all of my friends have them. Do you have dimples? Your friends? Today, your mission is to go in search of the elusive dimple, and smile.