Smile detection in face images captured in unconstrained real-world scenarios is an interesting problem with many potential applications. This paper presents an efficient approach to smile detection, in which the intensity differences between pixels in the grayscale face images are used as features. We adopt AdaBoost to choose and combine weak classifiers based on intensity differences to form a strong classifier. Experiments show that our approach has similar accuracy to the state-of-the-art method but is significantly faster. Our approach provides 85% accuracy by examining 20 pairs of pixels and 88% accuracy with 100 pairs of pixels. We match the accuracy of the Gabor-feature-based support vector machine using as few as 350 pairs of pixels.