Summary Perceptual‐cognitive impairment after general anaesthesia may affect the ability to reliably report pain severity with the standard visual analog scale (VAS). To minimise these limitations, we developed ‘PAULA the PAIN‐METER®’ (PAULA): it has five coloured emoticon faces on the forefront, it is twice as long as a standard VAS scale, and patients use a slider to mark their pain experience. Forty‐eight postoperative patients rated descriptive pain terms on PAULA and on a standard VAS immediately after admission and before discharge from the postanaesthesia care unit. Visual acuity was determined before both assessments. The values obtained with PAULA showed less variance than those obtained with the standard VAS, even at the first assessment, where only 23% of the patients had regained their visual acuity. Furthermore, the deviations of the absolute VAS values in individual patients for each descriptive pain term were significantly smaller with PAULA than with the standard VAS.