By now you may have heard the news that in France, a tourist board has asked Parisians to smile more.

It’s a smile campaign, really, and the idea is to woo tourists and help improve the city’s reputation for unfriendliness, according to Reuters.

Teams of “smile ambassadors” even have been appointed. As if that, in itself, isn’t enough to make you smile.

But, as anyone who has been instructed to say “Cheese” at the count of three knows, it isn’t easy to force a smile.

Still, people are asked to do it all of the time – and certainly not just in Paris.

And there comes a point when you simply are too old to have a photographer’s assistant wave a stuffed animal at you from behind the camera, in an attempt to make you smile.

In real life, smiling comes easy for many people. And the best smiles are the most sincere, naturally.

“Keep smiling; it makes people wonder what you’ve been up to,” is one popular phrase.

About a dozen or so years ago, the features department here at The Buffalo News ran a Great Smile Contest, inviting readers to submit photos of family members or friends.

Within about a week, we received close to 300 photographs of smilers ranging from ages 6 months to 98 years. One couple even sent in a photograph of their dog. Smiling, of course.

There were several winners; how could there not be? My own face hurt at the end of judging day, because viewing the faces in the photographs made me smile so much.

Granted, these days, there are many reasons in this world not to smile.

But I also know that it doesn’t take a contest to find great smiles out there, even in rough times.

As one writer put it: “An easy smile is a much-overlooked asset in today’s intense world.”

Then, of course, you have today’s celebrity nonsmilers, including Victoria Beckham, the former Posh Spice.

Upon her arrival to L.A. a couple years ago, she had this to say in a West Coast interview about her stony-faced ways: “I’m really going to try [to smile] more now that I’m moving to America, because you all smile so much and have such great pearly whites. I’ve just never been a big, big smiler.”

As parents, we all eagerly await our baby’s first smiles. And, as they grow, our kids’ smiles bring us great joy.

One of my favorite games I play with our daughter is the same game my dad played with me. You know the one. Dare someone not to smile.

“No smiling for 5 seconds!” I’ll say. Then I’ll start counting: “One, two, three, three-and-a-half ”

The key is to draw out the sound of each number – oneeeeeee, twooooooooo, etc.

My daughter rarely makes it beyond four before bursting into laughter. As a kid, I lost it by the count of three.

I also get a kick out of looking at the smiles on kids in her elementary-school yearbook. The ear-to-ear grins. The teeth-clenching smiles. The toothless smilesit’s all just too much.

I hope the smile campaign works in Paris. Perhaps I need to go over there, since my no-smiling-for-five seconds game has proved to be so successful here at home.

“Un, deux, trois ”