What does the gesture of touching your nose mean? Its relationship with the lie

When one begins to study or be interested in learning more about the meaning of gestures and body language, it is not uncommon to encounter certain gestures and postures that by society in general are cataloged with a certain very defined meaning. In this regard, we find that people often say things like “for such a gesture means such a thing“. One of those gestures is to touch your nose repeatedly when you are talking, which is commonly related to lying.

So what does it mean for someone to touch their nose once or multiple times during a conversation?

The reality is that the meaning of touching your nose, as with many other gestures, cannot always be interpreted in one way inflexibly.

In principle, the fact of scratching or touching the nose is usually related to the lie by the fact of considering that in the nose there are a high number of nerve endings that somehow activate when you are lying and that produces the itching that the person tries to relieve when scratching. Although by this same reasoning, there are other parts of the human body that contain many more nerve endings than the nose (and I better not say some of those parts) in which we should also be touching ourselves every time we tell a lie.

Another reason why touching your nose is related to lying is that since childhood, we instinctively put our hand to our faces when we tell a lie or say something we do not want, but over the years we learn to control that instinctive gesture and we hide it, so when we reach adulthood, we can tell a lie and not take our hand to cover our mouths directly as we would as children, but we control the gesture and perhaps scratch an eyebrow or touch an eye or an ear.

Just because a person touches their nose doesn’t mean they’re lying.

So, while it’s true that it’s commonly believed that when someone touches their nose it means they’re lying, it doesn’t really have to be that way.

As we have already mentioned other times, to decipher body language you have to take into account a whole set of gestures and postures. Some gestures are loaded with meaning, while others, such as touching your nose, have a very “soft” meaning, which means that it will only mean that you are lying if the whole set of gestures indicates the same thing, and that the possibility that a person is lying just by touching your nose is very very low.

Or maybe it is you who has the habit of touching your nose and you are ” up toyour nose” of being accused of always being lying?