Canthal tilt calculator: is your canthal tilt positive or negative?

What is canthal tilt?

Canthal tilt is the angle of the line from the inner corner of your eye to the outer corner, measured against a level line. When the outer corner sits higher than the inner one, the tilt is positive; when it sits lower, the tilt is negative. Most adult eyes tilt upward by a few degrees.

The two corners have anatomical names. The inner one is the medial canthus and the outer one is the lateral canthus, which is where “canthal” comes from. The outer corner is held in place by the lateral canthal tendon, which anchors to a small bump of bone just inside the rim of the eye socket (EyeWiki, American Academy of Ophthalmology). That is why your canthal tilt is set mostly by bone and a tendon, not by muscle you can train. Eyelid surgeons describe the outer corner as sitting about 2 mm higher than the inner one (EyeWiki).

Positive vs negative canthal tilt

A positive canthal tilt means the outer corners of your eyes sit above the inner corners, so the eyes slant gently upward. A negative canthal tilt means the outer corners sit below the inner ones, so the eyes slant down toward the sides of the face. Between them is a neutral tilt, where the corners are close to level.

Where the lines fall is a convention. This calculator uses the classes from a study of canthal tilt in surgical planning by Lee, Choung and Choung: below 0 degrees is negative (their class III), 0 to 5 degrees is neutral (class I), and above 5 degrees is positive (class II) (Journal of the Korean Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, 2020). The authors note that a negative tilt can make a face look tired, and that it is common in older people.

Positive tilt gets its reputation from research on attractiveness. When judges compared women’s faces with and without a slightly accentuated tilt, they picked the accentuated version 93% of the time (Bashour and Geist, 2007). But there is no one ideal for everyone. Comparing composite faces, Rhee and colleagues found that the attractive Asian composites had a gentler slant than the average Asian face, while the attractive white and African composites had a steeper slant than average (Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, 2012).

What is a normal canthal tilt?

A slightly positive tilt is the norm. Every average in the studies below is above zero, from about 2 degrees to about 8.5, and the spread between them comes from who was measured and how.

The two celebrity studies measured front photos the same way this calculator does: a line from the inner to the outer corner, against a level line, after correcting for a tilted head. The patient figures are medians, and people who visit a plastic surgeon are not a random sample, but they are the closest thing to everyday adult faces in the table. Within each group, most people landed within a few degrees of their group’s average.

Why canthal tilt varies

• Ancestry. The shape of the eye socket and cheekbones differs between populations. A 3D scan study found a larger canthal tilt in young white adults than in young Chinese adults of both sexes (Gao et al., 2025), the opposite of what many people assume.
• Sex. Women average a degree or two more than men, in both celebrity studies above.
• Age and lid laxity. The tendons at both corners of the eye weaken with age, which loosens the lower lid (EyeWiki). Odunze’s team found a lower tilt in patients over 45, while a study of 320 people aged 10 to 89 found the outer corner’s position did not change with age (van den Bosch et al., 1999). So the effect of age is real for some people and small or absent for others.
• Your two sides. In the Korean study, the outer corners differed in height by about 2 mm between the left and right eye on average. A degree or two of difference between your eyes is normal.

How photos and head angle change your canthal tilt

Canthal tilt is a small angle, so small things in a photo move it. This calculator corrects the biggest one, a head tilted to the side, by leveling your face on the line down its middle before it measures. The rest is up to the photo:

• Chin up or down. The outer corners sit deeper in the face than the inner ones. Tip your chin down, or shoot from above, and the outer corners rise in the photo; tip it up, or shoot from below, and they drop. A selfie from below can turn a neutral tilt negative.
• Camera distance. A phone held close works like a wide-angle lens and changes the shape of the face it records. A study of portraits taken at different focal lengths found the face shape measured from the same people changed with the lens (Třebický et al., 2016).
• Expression. A smile lifts the cheeks into the outer corners, and a squint narrows the eye. Both move the corners the calculator measures, so it warns you when it sees either.
• Makeup. A winged liner or dark shadow at the outer corner can change where the corner seems to be. For a true reading, measure a bare face.

Can you change your canthal tilt?

Not with exercises. Online advice says mewing, eye-pulling, or facial workouts will raise your outer corners, but the corner is held by a tendon fixed to bone. The American Association of Orthodontists says there is no current research showing mewing benefits the jawline or oral health, and warns it can push teeth out of place (AAO). A systematic review of facial exercises, massage, and similar techniques found the evidence too thin to say they work (Seraj et al., 2025).

What does change how your tilt reads:

• Eyeliner and shadow. A thin liner that flicks up from the outer third of the upper lash line, shadow that sweeps up and out, and lashes concentrated at the outer corner all draw the eye upward. Keep liner off the outer lower lash line, which pulls the corner down visually.
• Brows. The brow is the frame. A brow tail that ends level with or slightly above its start makes the eye under it look lifted; a tail that drops makes it look heavier.
• Thread lifts. In a small study of 22 women, a temporal thread lift raised canthal tilt from an average of 2.1 to 4.3 degrees at 6 months, settling to 3.6 at 12 months (Hong et al., 2026). The study had no control group, and the effect faded over the year.
• Surgery. A lateral canthoplasty or canthopexy repositions the outer corner. It was developed to repair loose or turned-out lower lids and is now also done for looks; the risks include a misaligned corner, scarring, and a lid that turns outward (EyeWiki). It is a decision for an oculoplastic surgeon, not a social media trend.

Canthal tilt and hunter eyes

“Hunter eyes” is a looksmaxxing term for deep-set, almond-shaped eyes with a positive canthal tilt, little visible upper lid, and low, straight brows. Canthal tilt is one ingredient, not the whole recipe: plenty of eyes with a strong positive tilt are round and open, and some hooded, deep-set eyes have a neutral tilt. Read more in the guide to hunter eyes, see how upturned and downturned eyes compare, or find your own in the eye shape detector.

How the canthal tilt calculator works

A face model running in your browser places 478 points on your face, including the inner and outer corner of each eye. We fit a line down the middle of your face, from forehead to nose tip, and turn the photo until that line is straight up, so a head tilted to the side doesn’t count against you. Then we measure the angle from each inner corner to its outer corner against the level, give you both eyes and their average, and class the average as negative, neutral, or positive.

On a typical selfie each eye is about 90 pixels wide, so a corner placed one pixel off moves the angle by about 0.6 degrees. Read your result to the nearest degree, and treat a difference under a degree between two photos as the same result.

How to take a photo for a canthal tilt test

1. Hold the camera at eye level, not below your chin, and keep your chin level.
2. Stand at arm’s length or farther, or prop the phone up and use the 2x lens.
3. Look straight into the lens with your eyes relaxed and fully open.
4. Keep a neutral face. No smile, no squint, no raised brows.
5. Go bare-faced around the eyes, in soft, even light from the front.

Want the rest of your face measured the same way? The face proportions calculator measures your facial thirds, midface ratio, and jaw, the golden ratio face calculator sets your proportions against 1.618, the face symmetry test compares your two sides, and the attractiveness test puts eye tilt, symmetry, and proportions together in one face score.