Face proportions calculator: facial thirds, midface ratio, and FWHR

How the face proportions calculator works

A face model running in your browser places 478 points on your face, including the centers of your irises. We fit a line down the middle of your face and turn the photo until it is straight up, find your hairline where your forehead meets your hair, and then measure seven proportions. Each one is a ratio, so it doesn’t matter how big your face is in the photo or how far away you stood, within reason.

Next to each result, the tick marks show what published studies found, with the source in the sections below. Where no study has measured something the same way, you get your number on its own.

What are the facial thirds?

The facial thirds split your face into three heights: the forehead, from your hairline to your brows; the midface, from your brows to the base of your nose; and the lower face, from the base of your nose to the bottom of your chin. The classic canon, which goes back to Renaissance artists, says the three should be equal.

Real faces rarely are. When Leslie Farkas and colleagues measured 153 young adults, the vertical canons were the ones that held least often, and the authors concluded the canons “do not represent the average facial proportions” (Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 1985). So a long forehead or a short lower face is a description, not a flaw. Your thirds bar shows each height as a share of your face length, against the canon’s 33%.

Your hairline is the soft spot. The face model stops on the upper forehead, so we look for the line where the color of your forehead turns to hair, and estimate it from the shape of your forehead when hair covers it or the photo cuts it off. The result tells you which one it used.

What is the midface ratio?

The midface ratio is the distance between your pupils divided by the height from your pupils down to the top of your upper lip. That is the definition most online face analysis uses, and it is what this calculator measures. A ratio above 1 means your eyes are spaced wider than your midface is tall; below 1, your midface runs longer.

Online, a ratio near 1.0 is called a “compact midface” and held up as ideal. That cutoff has not been tested in published research. The closest tested idea comes from Pallett, Link and Lee, who moved the eyes and mouth around on real faces and asked people which version looked best. The winners had the eyes about 36% of the face length above the mouth and the pupils about 46% of the face width apart, which they found are the proportions of an average face (Vision Research, 2010). Those two ratios are the “Eyes to mouth” and “Eye spacing” rows in your result. They measured face width between the inner edges of the ears, close to the outline width this calculator uses.

In clinical writing, “midface” means something else again: the middle third, from the brows to the base of the nose. That one is in your thirds bar.

Facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR)

Facial width-to-height ratio is the width of your face across the cheekbones divided by the height of your upper face, from your brows to your upper lip. Carré and McCormick made it famous in 2008, when they measured it on the photos of students and hockey players (Proceedings of the Royal Society B). In their photos, women averaged 1.80 and men 1.86. This calculator follows their method, taking the brow line along the lower edge of your brows.

Some studies measure the height from the top of the eyelids instead, which gives a shorter height and a bigger number. In three samples measured that way, the averages ran from 1.85 to 2.07, and men and women did not differ (Kramer, Jones and Ward, 2012). Your result gives your eyelid-method number too, so you can compare like with like.

You may have read that a high FWHR means more testosterone or aggression. The evidence is mixed at best, and the number is fragile: the same man’s FWHR changes between photos and with his expression, sometimes by more than the difference between two people (Kramer, 2016). Read it as a description of how wide your face is for its height.

Jaw to cheekbone width

This is the width of your jaw at its corners divided by the width of your face at the cheekbones. A low number means a jaw that tapers in under the cheeks; a high one, a jaw nearly as wide as the face. In a study that edited photos of Taiwanese women to make their jaws wider or narrower, people rated a jaw about 75% of the cheekbone width the most attractive, read anything above 83% as a square face, and liked 90% least (Wu et al., 2021). Men’s jaws are wider relative to their cheekbones on average (Liu et al., 2023), so a squarer jaw is typical for a man.

Two more rows round out your result. Nose to eye gap compares the width of your nose with the gap between your inner eye corners; the classic canon says they match, and in Farkas’s study they did in 40% of young adults, more often than any other canon. And the facial thirds bar shows your three heights at a glance.

Jawline rating: what a front photo can and can’t show

The jawline rating is built only from what a straight-on photo measures. It scores three parts out of 10 and averages them:

• Jaw width. Full marks anywhere from 70% to 82% of your cheekbone width, a jaw a little narrower than the cheeks, easing off on either side. It is the same rule the attractiveness test uses for its jawline part, so the two tools agree.
• Lower face. How close your lower third, nose base to chin, comes to an even third of your face length. Full marks at 33%; a lower face of 39% scores about 5. A very short lower face can read as a weak chin, and a very long one as a heavy jaw.
• Jaw symmetry. How closely the points along your cheeks and jaw mirror each other across the middle of your face, the same reading the face symmetry test gives for them. Jaw points sit on the soft edge of the face, where the model places them less tightly, so the scale is gentle: a 98% match scores about 8, and 96% about 4.5.

What it leaves out matters as much. The angle of the jaw, the corner below your ear, is a profile measurement: from the front, a sharp angle and a soft one can look the same. So is how far your chin projects, and the angle between your jaw and your neck. And the “definition” people mean when they talk about a sharp jawline is mostly how the light falls on the edge of the jaw and how much soft tissue sits over it, which no ratio captures.

Mewing won’t move any of these numbers. The American Association of Orthodontists says there is no current research showing that mewing benefits the jawline, and that pushing on your teeth with your tongue can shift them out of place (AAO). Our looksmaxxing guide covers the rest of the vocabulary, from gonial angle to mogging, and which changes have evidence behind them.

Is this a facial harmony test?

Facial harmony is how your features sit together, and proportions are the measurable part of it. This calculator gives you the raw measurements, each next to what studies found, rather than one score. For a single number, the attractiveness test turns your proportions, symmetry, eye tilt, and jaw into a face score out of 10. The golden ratio face calculator sets five pairs against 1.618, the face symmetry test mirrors your two sides, and the canthal tilt calculator measures the angle of each eye. For the shape of your eyes, try the eye shape detector.

How to take a photo for accurate face proportions

1. Hold the camera at eye level and keep your chin level. Tipping your head changes all three thirds.
2. Stand at arm’s length or farther, or prop the phone up and use the 2x lens. A close phone widens your nose and narrows your face.
3. Pull your hair back off your forehead and away from your cheeks and jaw.
4. Keep a neutral face with your lips closed. A smile widens your face and shortens your lower third.
5. Face soft, even light so the edges of your face and jaw stay visible.