How to determine face shape: a chart and a 5-minute check

How do I determine my face shape?

You determine your face shape by comparing three things: how long your face is compared with how wide it is, where it’s widest (forehead, cheekbones or jaw), and whether your jaw is rounded, angular or tapering to a narrow chin. Those three answers point to one of seven common shapes: oval, round, square, oblong (long), heart, diamond or triangle.

That’s really all a face shape is. It isn’t an anatomical category or a beauty rating; it’s shorthand stylists use to describe an outline, so they can suggest haircuts, glasses and brows that balance it. Plenty of faces sit between two shapes, and if yours does, you didn’t do it wrong. You just get to borrow ideas from both.

Here’s the quick version before we go step by step:

• Face about as long as it is wide, soft jaw: round.
• Longer than wide, jaw narrower than the cheekbones, gently curved: oval.
• Similar widths top to bottom, with a strong, angled jaw: square.
• Clearly longer than wide, with fairly straight sides: oblong.
• Wide forehead tapering to a narrow chin: heart.
• Widest at the cheekbones, narrower forehead and jaw: diamond.
• Jaw wider than the forehead: triangle (sometimes called pear).

How to measure your face shape at home

A front photo works better than eyeballing yourself in the mirror, because you can measure it and come back to it later. Any photo app with a crop or ruler tool will do; you only need to compare lengths with each other, so pixels are fine. If you’d rather use a mirror, trace your outline on the glass with a washable marker or an old lipstick, step back and look at the shape you drew.

Whichever way you go, do it like this:

• Pull all your hair back, off your forehead, temples and ears. Hair hides exactly the edges you need.
• Face the camera straight on with a relaxed expression, camera at eye height and at least an arm’s length away. A close phone camera makes the middle of the face look wider.
• Measure your forehead across its widest part, from temple to temple.
• Measure your cheekbones across the widest point, just below the outer corners of your eyes.
• Measure your jaw from one corner to the other, just below the ears.
• Measure your face length down the middle, from the hairline to the tip of your chin.
• Note which width is the largest, how the length compares with the cheekbone width, and whether the jaw line is curved, angled or pointed.
• Match those notes to the chart below. If two shapes fit equally well, you’re in between, which is common.

Face shape chart: what each of the seven shapes looks like

The outline descriptions below are the same ones FaceRater’s face shape detector uses, and the right-hand column shows the rule it applies. Those rules divide every measurement by cheek width, and length is measured from a point on the forehead the landmark model finds, not from your hairline. So the numbers won’t match a tape-measure reading that starts at the hairline (that one comes out longer). Use the descriptions to judge by eye, and the numbers to understand what the detector is looking at.

Oval or round? Square or oblong? Telling close shapes apart

Most mix-ups happen between two neighboring shapes, and each pair turns on a single question. Check the one that applies to you.

If you still can’t decide, that’s an answer too. Faces don’t come in seven boxes, and an outline right on a boundary will read as one shape in one photo and its neighbor in the next. Take hair and glasses ideas from both; they’ll mostly agree.

Can a photo or app tell your face shape accurately?

It can measure the outline more consistently than your eye, with some honest limits. FaceRater’s face shape detector finds 478 landmarks on a front photo, levels your eye line and divides each width by your cheek width. It then checks three signals: length (under 1.19× cheek width reads short, 1.28× or more reads long), the lower face (jaw width and how sharply the jaw turns, judged together), and whether the upper or lower outline is wider. Your result screen shows all three readings, so you can see why it landed where it did.

If a small, realistic change in one measurement, like a slightly different camera distance, would flip the answer, the detector names a close second shape instead of pretending to be sure. That happens a lot, and it’s the honest answer for in-between faces.

Two limits are worth knowing. The landmark model doesn’t find your hairline, so the top of its outline is a point on the forehead; forehead-led shapes such as heart and diamond are therefore the least certain calls, and hair over the temples makes them harder still. And any photo shifts the outline a little: a close camera, a tipped head or a big smile all change it. The scan runs in your browser, so your photo stays on your device.

• Hair pulled back from forehead and temples.
• Camera at eye height, at least an arm’s length away, head level.
• Relaxed mouth, no big smile, glasses off.
• Soft, even light from the front.
• If the result names a close second, try a second photo taken the same way.

What to do once you know your face shape

Face shape is most useful as a starting point for hair, glasses and brows. The general idea is always balance: add length to shorter outlines, width to longer ones, softness to angular jaws and fullness near a narrow chin. Each shape has its own hairstyle guide with pictured women’s and men’s cuts, what to ask your stylist and what to skip. There’s no separate guide for triangle faces yet; the hairstyle finder ranks cuts for that outline too.

For glasses, frames that contrast with your outline usually work best, such as angular frames on a round face or rounder frames on a square one. And no shape is better than another. FaceRater doesn’t score face shapes at all, and if you’re curious about the vertical proportions inside the outline, that’s what facial thirds describe.