Types of noses: 12 nose shapes and how to tell yours

What are the different types of noses?

The nose shapes you’ll see on most charts are straight (Greek), Roman, aquiline or hawk, bumpy, snub or button, upturned, Nubian, bulbous, fleshy, flat or wide, narrow, and long. None of these is a medical category. They’re everyday descriptions, borrowed from art, surgery consultations and makeup tutorials, and different sources draw the lines in different places.

The best-known attempt to count them came from Abraham Tamir, who sorted about 1,800 photos of faces and artworks and described 14 shapes in a 2011 paper. Even that list came mostly from European and Israeli faces, so it’s a starting point rather than a complete map of human noses.

It helps to see each name as a mix of a few separate traits. Your nose has one answer for each, which is why it can be “straight with a rounded tip” or “wide with a slight hump” rather than one tidy type:

• Bridge profile: straight, curving out (convex, with or without a hump) or dipping in (concave). Side view.
• Tip direction: pointing forward, turned up or angled down. Side view.
• Tip size: fine and defined, or rounder and fuller. Front and side.
• Width: how wide the nostrils and the base sit across the face. Front view.
• Length and height: how long the nose is, and how high the bridge sits between the eyes. Front and side.

Nose shapes chart: what each type looks like

Here are the common names, what people usually mean by them, and the view that shows each one best. If two rows describe you, both apply. Plenty of noses are a Roman bridge with a rounded tip, or a straight bridge that turns up at the end.

How to tell your nose shape

You need two photos: one straight from the front and one in true profile, taken from the side at nose height. Most of the names above describe the profile, so the side photo does more of the work. Ask someone to take it, or prop your phone at head height and use the timer.

Then go through the traits one at a time:

• Stand about an arm’s length or more from the camera. Close-up selfies make the nose look bigger and the face narrower.
• Keep your head level and your face relaxed. Smiling widens the nostrils and lifts the tip.
• In the side photo, lay a ruler or straight edge from the point between your eyes to the tip: straight, curving out, or dipping in?
• Still in profile, look at the tip: does it point forward, up or down?
• In the front photo, compare the width of your nose base with the space between the inner corners of your eyes.
• Look at the tip from the front: is it narrower than, about the same as, or wider than the bridge?
• Put it together, for example “straight bridge, upturned tip, about eye-gap width.”

Is my nose wide or narrow? What real noses measure

The old artists’ rule says the nose should be as wide as the gap between the eyes. Like most classic proportion rules, it describes a drawing, not real people. When researchers measure faces, the nose is usually wider than the eye gap: one 2015 study of young adults from the Arabian Peninsula found a wider nose than eye gap in 92% of men and 56% of women, and a 2023 study in Kerala, India found it in almost everyone. Leslie Farkas, who measured North American faces in the 1980s, found the rule held in only a minority of them.

FaceRater measures the same relationship: the visible width across the nose wings divided by the space between the inner eye corners. The table shows that ratio in 2,560 front-facing adult photos from FairFace, a public research set balanced across seven groups. A value of 1.00 would match the old rule exactly. The landmark points sit a little differently from a clinician’s calipers, so compare your result with this table rather than with the studies.

Most faces land above 1.00, and the spread is wide: a nose at 1.08 or 1.29 times the eye gap is still inside the middle eight in ten. Typical width also differs between groups of people, so the score compares you with the group whose typical value is closest to yours. A width that is common in any group isn’t treated as unusual.

Makeup, glasses and brows for your nose shape

Contour and highlight change how light falls on the nose, which is most of what the eye reads as shape. Use a matte shade one or two steps deeper than your skin for shadows, a soft highlight for the parts you want to bring forward, and blend until there are no visible lines. Strong contour looks best in photos taken straight on; in daylight and from the side, less is more.

Glasses sit right on the nose, so the bridge matters as much as the frame shape. If your bridge is low or flat, frames with adjustable nose pads, or styles sold as low-bridge fit, stop the lenses sliding down and resting on your cheeks. Opticians often suggest a lower-set bridge to make a long nose look a little shorter, and a higher or keyhole bridge to add length to a short one.

Brows frame the nose too. Brow artists start the brow straight above the side of the nose, so the gap between your brows sits roughly in line with your nose. Brows that start further apart than that can make the nose look wider; starting them closer can make it read narrower.

If you’re thinking about changing the shape itself, such as with rhinoplasty or nonsurgical filler, that’s a medical decision for a qualified professional who can examine your nose in three dimensions and talk through what’s realistic. A photo app can’t tell you whether you need it.

Can an app tell your nose shape?

Only part of it, and it should say which part. FaceRater’s attractiveness test reads one front photo. It measures your nose width against the gap between your eyes, and your mouth width against your nose width, and shows both next to the common range of the reference faces with the lines drawn on your photo. Those sit in the Facial fifths part of the result, 5 proportions that together count for 25% of your harmony score. The scan runs in your browser and the photo stays on your device.

What a front photo can’t see is the profile. A dorsal hump, how far the nose projects from the face, which way the tip points and how high the bridge sits all need a side view, so the test doesn’t guess them and doesn’t name a nose type. Use the chart and your side photo for those, and the test for width and how your nose sits among your other features.