Lip shapes: a chart of the types of lips and how to tell yours

What are the different lip shapes?

The lip shapes most charts list are full, thin, heart-shaped, bow-shaped, wide, round, top-heavy, bottom-heavy, downturned and upturned. They’re makeup-counter descriptions rather than medical terms, and they overlap on purpose: lips can be wide and thin, or full with a soft bow and slightly downturned corners. Most people fit two or three names at once.

It’s clearer to read lip shape as five separate traits. Your lips have one answer for each:

• Fullness: how much lip shows from top to bottom when your mouth is relaxed. Full, medium or thin.
• Balance: how the upper lip compares with the lower one. Even, top-heavy or bottom-heavy. In many faces the lower lip is a little fuller.
• Width: how far the corners reach across the face. Wide, average or narrow.
• Cupid’s bow: the dip in the middle of the upper lip and the two peaks beside it. Pronounced, soft or almost flat.
• Corners: whether the corners sit level, tip up or tip down when your face is relaxed.

Lip shapes chart: what each type looks like

Here are the common names, what people usually mean by them, and the quickest way to check each one. Use a mirror at eye level with your face relaxed and your lips gently closed.

How to tell your lip shape

A bare-lipped mirror check takes a minute. Lipstick and liner change the outline, so start without them, and judge your lips at rest: smiling stretches them wider and thinner, and pressing them together hides the fullness.

• Face a mirror or your front camera at eye level, about an arm’s length away, in soft front light.
• Relax your jaw and let your lips close gently without pressing.
• Fullness and balance: compare the height of your upper lip with your lower lip. About the same, top-heavy or bottom-heavy?
• Cupid’s bow: follow the top edge. Is there a clear V with two peaks, a gentle dip, or almost a straight line?
• Width: imagine lines straight down from the centers of your eyes. Do your mouth corners reach them, stop inside them, or go past?
• Corners: hold a straight edge across the middle line of your lips and see whether the corners sit above, on or below it.
• Write it down as a combination, such as “medium, bottom-heavy, soft bow, slightly wide.”

Is my mouth wide? What real faces measure

Two classic proportion rules touch the lips. One says the mouth should be about one and a half times as wide as the nose. The other says that in the lower face, from the base of the nose to the chin, the upper lip takes about one third and the lower lip and chin take the other two thirds, a 1:2 split. Both come from artists’ canons, and both describe a drawing better than a real face. A 2023 study of adults in Kerala, India found mouths narrower than one and a half nose widths in roughly eight in ten people.

FaceRater measures both relationships from one front photo, and the table shows them in 2,560 front-facing adult photos from FairFace, a public research set balanced across seven groups. The mouth is measured corner to corner and the nose across the nose wings; the lip split runs from the base of the nose to the line where the lips meet, and from there to the chin. These points sit a little differently from a clinician’s, so compare your result with this table rather than with the rules.

The typical mouth is about 1.24 times the nose width here, well under the classic 1.5, and the typical lip split sits close to the classic 0.5. Both vary a lot from face to face: anything inside the eight-in-ten range is common. The score compares you with the group of reference faces whose typical value is closest to yours, so a proportion common in any group isn’t treated as unusual.

Makeup for your lip shape

Lip liner decides the shape and lipstick decides how much attention it gets. Line first with a pencil close to your natural lip color, then fill in, and keep any change to the outline small. Going more than a hair outside your natural edge tends to show up close or in daylight. Matte and deep shades make lips look smaller and sharper; gloss, shimmer and lighter shades make them look fuller.

Find the combination that matches you below and start there. If two tips pull in different directions, follow the one for the trait you care about most. Color is a separate question from shape: your skin’s undertone decides which reds, pinks and nudes look most natural on you.

Fillers and other cosmetic treatments change lip volume or outline, and whether they make sense is a medical decision for a qualified professional who can examine your lips and talk you through the options. A photo can’t answer that for you.

Can a photo tell your lip shape?

Some of it. FaceRater’s attractiveness test reads one front photo and measures two lip-related proportions: your mouth width against your nose width, in the Facial fifths part of your result, and your upper lip against your lower lip and chin, in the Facial thirds part. Each shows next to the common range of the reference faces, with the lines drawn on your photo. The scan runs in your browser and the photo stays on your device.

It doesn’t measure lip fullness, the balance between your upper and lower lip, the depth of your cupid’s bow or how far your lips project from the side, and it doesn’t name a lip shape. Those need a closer look than a face-wide landmark scan gives, so use the mirror check and the chart for them. The test also flags or refuses photos with a big smile or an open mouth, because both change the lower face’s proportions.