MeasureFace

Face shape chart: the 6 face shapes, measured side by side

One chart for the six shapes, each with a face this tool actually measured and the numbers it returned, rather than an illustration drawn to fit its own label. Below the chart: which of the confusable pairs has a real measurement behind it, which has none, and why no honest version of this page can tell you which shape is most common.

What are the 6 face shapes?

The 6 face shapes are oval, round, square, oblong, heart and diamond. Three things separate them: how long the face is against its width, which of forehead, cheekbones and jaw is widest, and whether the jaw has a corner. The table puts all six against those three.

The 6 face shapes compared by length against width, widest part and jaw
Face shapeLength against widthWidest partJaw
OvalLonger than wideCheekbonesTapers gently to a rounded chin
RoundAbout as long as wideCheeksSoft, no corner
SquareAbout as long as wideForehead, cheekbones and jaw about equalDefined corner below the ear
OblongClearly longer than wideForehead, cheekbones and jaw about equalStraight sides
HeartNot the deciding checkForeheadNarrow, small or pointed chin
DiamondNot the deciding checkCheekbones, clearly; forehead also narrowNarrow, pointed chin

Which of the 6 face shapes do you have? Three checks, in order

  1. Check 1

    Does the face narrow to a small or pointed chin?

    If it does, the forehead decides, whatever the length: a forehead as wide as the cheekbones or wider is heart, a forehead clearly narrower than the cheekbones is diamond. Take that width at the temples, not the hairline: the hairline is a haircut, the temples are bone. If the chin is not narrow, go on.

  2. Check 2

    Is the face clearly longer than it is wide?

    Compare hairline-to-chin length with the width across the cheekbones. Clearly longer is oval if the face is widest at the cheekbones and curves in to a rounded chin, and oblong if the sides run almost straight down. About equal is round or square, and check 3 decides which.

  3. Check 3

    Is there a corner at the jaw?

    Run a finger along the jaw towards the ear. A visible turn is square, a continuous curve is round. Round and square have the same proportions, so this is the only check that separates them.

A mirror and a strip of paper are enough for all three. If two answers point different ways, you are between two shapes, which is common (see the FAQ below). The face shape detector measures the same length and widths from a photo and ranks all six.

The six face shape types, each with a measured face

Every card below carries a real portrait this tool measured and the numbers it returned, rather than an illustration drawn to fit the label. Length is the face length divided by cheekbone width. Forehead and jaw are each given as a share of cheekbone width, so a number below 1.00 means narrower than the cheekbones.

  • no measured example

    Diamond face shape

    We have no portrait that measures as diamond. That is not an oversight. See below.

    Cheekbones are the widest part by a clear margin, with both the forehead and the jaw noticeably narrower, and the chin coming to a point.

    How to tell: The forehead is narrow. That is what separates diamond from every other shape, and it is also the hardest thing to judge.

    Confused with: Heart, which also narrows to a pointed chin but keeps a wide forehead.

  • AI generated face measured as heart

    Heart face shape

    Length
    1.37
    Forehead
    0.85
    Jaw
    0.77
    Jaw angle
    135°

    Widest across the forehead, narrowing through the cheeks to a small and often pointed chin.

    How to tell: Forehead wider than the jaw, usually by a lot. Sometimes a widow's peak, though that is hair rather than bone.

    Confused with: Diamond. The chin looks the same; the forehead does not.

  • AI generated face measured as oblong

    Oblong face shape

    Length
    1.50
    Forehead
    0.85
    Jaw
    0.77
    Jaw angle
    139°

    Noticeably longer than it is wide, with forehead, cheekbones and jaw close to the same width down the whole face.

    How to tell: The sides run almost parallel. Length is doing the work rather than any one width.

    Confused with: Oval, which is also long but curves in at the jaw instead of running straight.

  • AI generated face measured as oval

    Oval face shape

    Length
    1.37
    Forehead
    0.86
    Jaw
    0.82
    Jaw angle
    131°

    Longer than wide, widest at the cheekbones, tapering gently to a rounded chin with no hard corners anywhere.

    How to tell: Everything is in the middle of its range. Oval is the shape defined by not being any of the others.

    Confused with: Oblong when the face is long, round when it is not.

  • AI generated face measured as round

    Round face shape

    Length
    1.28
    Forehead
    0.85
    Jaw
    0.78
    Jaw angle
    131°

    Length and width are close to equal, the cheeks are the fullest part, and the jaw curves with no visible corner.

    How to tell: No corner at the jaw. If you can find the angle where the jaw turns, it is probably square.

    Confused with: Square, which has the same proportions but a corner.

  • AI generated face measured as square

    Square face shape

    Length
    1.29
    Forehead
    0.85
    Jaw
    0.82
    Jaw angle
    127°

    Forehead, cheekbones and jaw are close to the same width, and the jaw has a defined corner below the ear.

    How to tell: The corner. Square and round differ by jaw angle, not by proportion.

    Confused with: Round. The two are the same rectangle with different corners.

Telling the confusable pairs apart

Three pairs account for almost every disagreement about face shape types. Exactly one of them has a defensible numeric criterion behind it, and it is not the pair people argue about most.

Oblong against oval

Measurable

This is purely a length-to-width question, and physical anthropology has measured exactly that for a century as the morphological facial index: face height over cheekbone width, times 100, with five named bands and published population distributions. It is replicable and caliper-measurable.

What it will not give you is the boundary. The anthropometric scale is five bands on one continuum and no publication maps it onto the styling pair, so inventing a cutoff where oval becomes oblong would be manufacturing a number. Use the index to describe how long a face is, not to adjudicate the label.

Round against square

No published criterion

The difference here is jaw angularity, which the facial index cannot see at all: two faces with an identical index can have a soft jaw or a sharp one. The nearest real measurement is the gonial angle, the angle at the corner of the jaw, which is a genuine anthropometric variable.

But no paper defines where a square face begins in degrees, and using the gonial angle that way would be fabrication. One warning if you are tempted to reason it out yourself: the literature reports that this angle increases with age, so the folk rule that a square jaw means a low angle is not a safe simplification.

Heart against triangle

No measurement basis

There is none, because triangle is not in the research at all. The published machine-vision work on face shape uses five classes, heart, oblong, oval, round and square, and triangle appears in none of them.

Triangle and diamond are both styling-site additions, which is visible in their own numbers: three tool sites report triangle at 0.03 percent, 0.05 percent and 8.6 percent. A category whose reported prevalence varies by a factor of nearly 300 between sources is not a category anyone is measuring.

How common is each face shape type?

There is no peer-reviewed prevalence distribution for these six or seven categories in any human population. Every percentage in circulation comes from a face shape tool counting its own visitors, and the four we checked disagree by up to five times on diamond alone. One calls diamond the rarest shape. Another's own figures make it the second most common.

The reason is the taxonomy itself. It did not come from anatomy, it came from eyewear retail, and the number of categories has never settled: four, five, six, seven or nine depending on the source. Physical anthropology does have a real length-to-width taxonomy with published distributions, and in it the most common category flips between populations and with age, so even there the answer is not a single most common face.

The full version of this, with the four tool sites side by side and three measured population studies, is on the face shape detector homepage.

Face shape chart questions

What are the 6 face shapes?

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Oval, round, square, heart, oblong (also called long or rectangle) and diamond. Oval and oblong are the long ones. Round and square have the same proportions and differ only by whether the jaw has a corner. Heart and diamond both narrow to a pointed chin and differ at the forehead, which is wide on a heart and narrow on a diamond. Some charts add triangle as a seventh, which has no basis in the published measurement research.

How many face shapes are there?

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There is no settled answer, which is the first thing worth knowing about any face shape chart. Sources use four, five, six, seven or nine categories, and the taxonomy did not come from anatomy. It came from eyewear retail. The published machine-vision work uses five classes: heart, oblong, oval, round and square. Triangle and diamond are styling-site additions, and three tool sites report triangle at 0.03 percent, 0.05 percent and 8.6 percent, a spread of nearly 300 times between sources.

Which face shape is the rarest?

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Nobody can answer it from measurement, because no peer-reviewed prevalence distribution exists for these categories in any population. In our own count, square came back once in 43 measured faces. The full count, what it can and cannot tell you, and the method behind it are on the rarest face shape page linked below.

Can a face be between two face shapes?

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Routinely. A university study building a face shape classifier checked celebrities whose shape is published in more than one place and found 62 of 117 names had conflicting classifications across the 21 sites reviewed, 53 percent disagreement on the same faces with the same labels. The best classifier in that work agreed with its own human labellers about 85 percent of the time on five classes, which is the realistic ceiling rather than a defect of any one tool. Our own detector reports a pair rather than a single label when the two closest shapes are within a set margin.

If what brought you here was which of the six is least common, that has its own page with the counts and the method: the rarest face shape, counted across 43 measured faces.

Measure your own

The chart above is the reference. To find where your own face sits against it, the detector reports all six ranked, with the measurements behind the ranking, and says so plainly when two of them are too close to separate.

Face shape detectorAll six ranked from 43 measured reference faces. Runs on your device; the photo is never uploaded.

The outline is only one part of a face. The same photo also gives your nose shape, measured as a nasal index, and a facial symmetry test that compares each side feature by feature. For the names people give noses, the nose type finder works from your profile and front view together. To check the length and widths behind a shape with a ruler, the face measurements page walks through four readings.

The length and width behind a shape also feed two other tools: the facial golden ratio calculator scores eight classical proportions one at a time, and the attractiveness test combines symmetry, averageness and proportion into a 0 to 100 harmony score with its formula shown.