The best new thing on a smartphone – smile alert.

Blind people say being blind is not a tragic condition, but just another way of being in the world. You may not see, but, when you touch or feel, that’s real, too.

But what about a smile? It communicates so much but don’t we have to see it?

With the help of the Royal National Institute of Blind People, Listerine and JWT London created the Smile Detector, an app for smartphones that lets blind people feel a smile.

The app uses facial recognition to monitor nearby faces for even the gentlest smile, and then notifies the user with vibration and sound.

The moving responses of the blind people who’ve tried it testify to the joy of “feeling” a smile. “I’d forgotten about smiles,” one person said.

Listerine and JWT told the story of “feel every smile” in a short film. It helped everyone – not just the blind – to realise how powerful a smile can be.