Face
shapes

The four measurements

Every face-shape chart ever printed comes down to the same four numbers. Tie your hair back, face a mirror straight on, and compare them.

• — Length, from the hairline down to the point of the chin.
• — Width at the cheekbones, at their widest point.
• — Width across the forehead, about halfway up.
• — Width at the jaw, measured below the ears from corner to corner.

The shape is the pattern those four make, plus one judgement: whether the jaw turns a corner or curves. Length clearly greater than width with a rounded jaw is oval. The same proportions with a corner are oblong. Width and length close is round or square, and again the jaw decides which. Widest at the forehead is heart, widest at the cheekbones is diamond.

The six shapes

Most people sit between two

A face that reads as round in one photograph and square in the next is not a failure of the categories. It is a face whose length and width are close, sitting on the line between the two shapes that share those proportions. If two pages below describe you equally well, read both and take the advice they agree on, which is usually most of it.

What a face shape does not tell you

It does not tell you what you are not allowed to wear. The long lists of prohibitions attached to each shape mostly descend from one magazine template that treats every face as a geometry problem to be corrected towards oval. There is no reason a round face should be sculpted into an oval one, and the makeup that tries usually reads as makeup that is trying. What the shape genuinely tells you is where the width already is, and where it is not. That is enough to decide where blush goes and how much definition a jaw needs, and those two decisions change a face more than any amount of contour.

Measure it rather than guess

Holding a tape measure to your own face in a mirror is awkward, and the usual alternative is a quiz that asks whether your jaw is soft or angular, which is the question you wanted answered. The face shape detector takes the four measurements from one photograph in your browser, names the shape whose definition they fit best, and says when two shapes fit almost equally well. It is free, and the photograph is never uploaded.