Bay Area City Ranked Happiest, Smiliest In America: Study

CONCORD, CA — The East Bay city of Concord was ranked the No. 1 happiest and smiliest city in America in a study sponsored by HouseFresh.

"We used Microsoft’s face recognition API, Azure, to analyze a database of Instagram selfies from every state and the 100 biggest U.S. cities to see which are the happiest places to live," the study's authors wrote.

"This facial recognition tool places numerical estimates on emotions based on characteristics and expressions. To work out the happiest cities and states, we used the FaceAPI happiness score, averaging all the scores in each location. For the smiliest cities and states, we considered that a face has a smile if its smile score was greater than 0.75. The locations were ranked by the percentage of people smiling."

The results? Concord had a happiness score of 79.1 out of 100, the highest score in America. With nearly three-quarters of residents 74.4 percent grinning in their photos, it also ranked the smiliest.

"On a citywide scale, Concord reverses the trend of its home state California, boasting both the highest average happiness rating and most intense smiles," the study's authors wrote. "The hometown of Tom Hanks is said to be a quiet and pleasant place to live: moderately wealthy, moderately liberal, and more affordable than similar cities nearby."

Here are the Top 10 Happiest Cities in America, according to the study:

1. Concord, California: 79.1
2. Provo, Utah: 74.95
3. Knoxville, Tennessee: 74.72
4. Charleston, South Carolina: 74.17
5. Mesa, Arizona: 71.48
6. Cape Coral, Florida: 70.89
7. Ogden, Utah: 69.15
8. Nashville, Tennessee: 68.31
9. Sarasota, Florida: 66.78
10. New Orleans, Louisiana: 65.87

As for the happiest state, that went to Utah with a 74.79 score. Utah was also the smiliest state, with 70.78 percent of residents grinning in their selfies. Meanwhile, California's happiness score was only 38.37.

View the full study here.