Oval
face shape

How to recognise it

Tie your hair back and face a mirror straight on. An oval face is longer than it is wide, usually by something close to half again, and the outline curves the whole way round with no point at which it turns a corner.

• — Length from hairline to chin is clearly the largest of the four measurements.
• — The cheekbones are the widest horizontal line, but only just.
• — The forehead is a little wider than the jaw, and neither is dramatic about it.
• — The jaw curves from the ear to the chin without a visible corner, and the chin itself is rounded rather than pointed.

The two shapes oval is most often confused with are oblong and heart. Oblong shares the curved outline but runs longer, with the three widths nearly equal and the sides close to parallel. Heart shares the narrowing jaw but takes it much further, to a definite point, with a forehead that is clearly the widest line rather than marginally so.

Measure it rather than guess

Oval and oblong are separated by a ratio, not by a feeling, and a ratio is a poor thing to judge in a mirror. The face shape detector takes the four measurements from one photograph, in your browser, and tells you which shape they fit and how close the second-best fit was. Free, no account, and the photograph is never uploaded.

Where to put colour

Because nothing needs shortening or widening, blush becomes a choice about mood rather than correction. On the apple of the cheek and blended straight up towards the top of the ear is the neutral option: it lifts without moving the width anywhere. Kept low and taken outwards reads softer and slightly younger. Swept high along the cheekbone reads sharper. All three work, which is the genuine advantage here.

Contour, if you use it, has one job on an oval face and it is a small one: a cool-toned shade in the hollow under the cheekbone, started at the hairline by the top of the ear and stopped in line with the outer corner of the eye. Taking it further in towards the mouth is what produces the stripe. The jaw needs nothing. A touch of highlight on the top of the cheekbone, the brow bone and the centre of the chin is enough.

Brows are the one place where the shape does give a default: a soft arch peaking above the outer third of the iris, following the bone rather than redrawing it. A very high or very angular arch adds length to a face that already has the length it wants.

Hair

The only real risk is adding length to a face that is already the longer proportion. Long, straight, flat hair with a centre parting draws two vertical lines down the sides of the face and pushes oval towards oblong. Volume at the sides rather than at the crown, waves that begin around the cheekbone, or a blunt cut ending at the jaw all restore the width. A full fringe shortens the visible face by an inch or two and is the fastest way to change the proportion in either direction, which is worth knowing before you ask for one.

Glasses

Two measurements matter more than the frame style. The frame should be no wider than the widest part of your face, and it should not be so deep from top to bottom that it fills the space between cheekbone and jaw, which is what makes a face look crowded. Within that, square and rectangular frames lend a little structure to a face with no hard lines of its own, round frames echo the curve, and an oversized frame is the only thing that genuinely fights the proportion.

What is a myth

That oval is the ideal and the other five are deviations from it. That idea comes from a magazine template, not from anything about faces, and its main effect has been decades of advice telling people to contour themselves towards a shape they were never going to have. The useful reading of oval is much duller: it is the shape whose proportions are closest to even, so corrective placement has nothing to correct.

The other myth worth dropping is that an oval face needs contour to keep its shape. Nothing about a bone structure requires maintenance. Contour on an oval face is decoration, and treating it as decoration tends to produce a better result than treating it as repair.