How many times do you blink per minute? Your webcam counts for 60 seconds, then you see where you land against 150 adults filmed for a study. The video never leaves your device.
What will you be doing for the minute?
Don't try to control your blinking — the count stays hidden until the end.
Starting camera...
60seconds left
The Lighthouse on Carrow Point
Every evening at a quarter to six, Ines climbed the ninety-one steps of the Carrow Point lighthouse with a thermos of tea and a paperback she never finished. The lamp had been automatic for eleven years. Nobody needed her up there. She went anyway, because the town had stopped noticing the light, and she thought somebody ought to.
From the gallery she could see the whole bay: the ferry nosing out towards the islands, the gulls arguing over the harbour wall, the fishing boats coming home in a loose line like ducklings. On clear nights she counted the other lighthouses along the coast, each one blinking its own rhythm. Two short, one long. Four quick flashes, then darkness. Sailors used to know them by heart, the way you know a friend's knock at the door.
One October night the lamp stopped turning. Ines noticed before the alarm did. The beam hung frozen over the water, pointing at nothing, and for a strange moment the whole bay seemed to hold its breath. She found the fault in the old gear housing, a sheared pin no longer than her little finger, and replaced it with a bolt from her own bicycle.
The light began to sweep again. Out on the water, a small boat she had not seen flashed its torch twice, as if to say thank you. Ines poured the last of her tea, opened her paperback, and did not finish it.
Your blink rate
0blinks / min
Compared with the averages from Bentivoglio et al. (1997), 150 adults
For curiosity, not diagnosis. If your eyes feel dry, sore or tired, an optometrist or eye doctor is the right test.
How many times do you blink per minute?
There is no single number, because blinking follows what your brain is doing. The cleanest measurement comes from a 1997 study by neurologists at the Università Cattolica in Rome, published in Movement Disorders: they videotaped 150 healthy volunteers, aged 5 to 87, in a standard setting while they sat quietly, read a short passage, and talked freely. Then they counted.
Average blink rate by task — Bentivoglio et al., 1997 (n = 150)
What the person was doing
Blinks per minute
One blink every
Talking
26
2.3 s
Resting, eyes open
17
3.5 s
Reading
4.5
13 s
The gap between talking and reading is almost six to one. For the same person, reading cut the rate by about 55% compared with resting, and talking roughly doubled it. The authors' conclusion is the useful part: blink rate is driven more by what the mind is doing than by age, eye colour or glasses. They found no difference with age, none with eye colour, none between people with and without glasses. The one gap between sexes showed up only during reading, where women blinked more than men.
So what's "normal"? Compare yourself with the average for the same activity, not with a single figure. 6 blinks a minute is ordinary while reading and unusual while chatting. That's why the test above asks what you'll be doing first.
How this blink test works
The page runs Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker directly in your browser. It places 478 points on your face in every video frame. We use four per eye — the top and bottom of the eyelid opening and the two corners — to compute the eye aspect ratio: the height of the opening divided by the width of the eye. Open eyes typically read between 0.2 and 0.4 depending on the face; a closing eye falls far below that.
A blink is counted when that ratio drops below 70% of your own open-eye level for at least two frames, then comes back up within a second. Your open-eye level is re-measured continuously from the last two seconds of video, because your eyelids naturally sit lower when you look down at a line of text. Closures longer than a second are ignored: that's shutting your eyes, not blinking.
Only the time the camera can actually see your face counts towards the minute. Look away and the clock pauses rather than lowering your score. Everything happens on your device: the video is never recorded or uploaded, and we don't store your result. Privacy details.
Why your blink rate drops on screens
A screen is mostly something you read, so it inherits the reading drop: from 17 blinks a minute to single digits. Fewer blinks means the tear film on the front of the eye has longer to evaporate between refreshes, which is one reason long screen sessions leave eyes dry, tired or blurry by the evening. What each blink actually does is explained on our science page.
The simplest counter-measure is the one eye-care organisations such as the American Academy of Ophthalmology recommend: the 20-20-20 rule. Every 20 minutes, look at something about 20 feet (6 metres) away for 20 seconds. It breaks the stare, and your blink rate recovers on its own.
Blinking a lot: when to pay attention
A high count on its own is rarely meaningful — in the reference study, blink rates followed a skewed curve with a long tail of fast blinkers, all of them healthy volunteers. Rates also rise with stress, tiredness, conversation and dry air. What matters more is how your eyes feel. Frequent blinking together with dryness, grittiness, burning or redness is worth mentioning to an optometrist; dry eye and irritation are common and treatable. Blinking or twitching you cannot control, or that spreads to other muscles of the face, is a reason to see a doctor.
Counting blinks is the easy part. Stopping them is the game.
About 17 times at rest, 26 while talking and 4.5 while reading, on average, according to a study that filmed 150 healthy adults (Bentivoglio et al., 1997). Your own rate can sit well above or below those averages and still be normal.
Is it normal to blink 30 times a minute?
While talking, it's not far from the 26-per-minute average. At rest it's above the 17 average, but blink rates vary a lot between healthy people. If it comes with dry, gritty or sore eyes, have them checked by an optometrist.
Why is my blink rate so low?
You were probably concentrating. Focus is the strongest brake on blinking: reading brought the average down to 4.5 per minute in the study. Screens have the same effect, which is why the 20-20-20 rule exists.
How many times do you blink a day?
At the resting average of 17 per minute, 16 waking hours make about 16,000 blinks. A day of reading and screens pulls that down; a day of meetings pushes it up.
How accurate is a webcam blink test?
Accurate enough to tell 5 from 15 from 25 blinks a minute. It can miss very fast or partial blinks, and dim light or glare on glasses makes tracking harder. One minute is a small sample: run it twice and take the average.
Is my video recorded?
No. The face tracking runs inside your browser. No frame is uploaded, and the result stays on your screen unless you copy it.
Source
Bentivoglio AR, Bressman SB, Cassetta E, Carretta D, Tonali P, Albanese A. Analysis of blink rate patterns in normal subjects. Movement Disorders. 1997;12(6):1028-1034. doi:10.1002/mds.870120629. PubMed 9399231.