Heart face shape
A jaw under 89% of the forehead, and narrow in its own right — both conditions, not one.
Also called inverted triangle.
Measure your own face shapeWhat the measurements say
Widest at the forehead, narrowing through the cheekbones to a noticeably narrow jaw and a tapered chin.
The rule that produces it: Jaw under 89% of the forehead, and more than 3 points narrower than a typical jaw.
A worked example
These are tape measurements that produce a heart result. They are checked against the classifier itself, so if the rule ever changed and this example stopped producing this shape, the build would fail rather than the page quietly misleading you.
| Forehead width | 128 mm |
|---|---|
| Face width at cheekbones | 140 mm |
| Jaw width | 98 mm |
| Hairline to chin | 190 mm |
| Ratio | This face | Typical |
|---|---|---|
| Length over width | 1.15 | 1.15 |
| Forehead over width | 0.91 | 0.86 |
| Jaw over width | 0.70 | 0.8 |
The length is the hairline-to-chin measurement with 29 mm subtracted, because the photo tool measures from a point on the forehead that sits below the hairline. The tape tool explains that conversion and why it matters.
Telling it apart from what it gets confused with
This is the part most pages on the subject skip, because you cannot write it without a classifier to disagree with. Each of these comes down to one measurement.
Heart or diamond?
The forehead. Heart has a wide forehead over a narrow jaw; diamond has both ends narrow against wide cheekbones. If your forehead sits more than 4 points below typical, the taper is not a heart, it is a diamond.
More on the diamond face shape
Heart or oval?
How pronounced the taper is. A jaw narrower than the forehead is completely ordinary — the measured average is about 93% — so a mild taper is just a face. Heart requires it to reach 89% and for the jaw to be genuinely narrow against the cheekbones too.
What is worth knowing about it
Heart is the category that was wrong in the first version of this tool, and the error is instructive. The rule originally fired on a jaw narrower than the forehead, full stop. That describes almost everybody: measured across real faces, the average jaw is around 93% of the forehead. A third of every face tested came out heart-shaped.
Requiring two conditions fixed it. The taper has to be pronounced — the jaw under 89% of the forehead — and the jaw has to be narrow against the cheekbones in its own right, more than 3 points below the typical 80%. A face can have a wide forehead without a narrow jaw, and that is not this category.
This is one of the three shapes that a tape measure handles well, because both of the deciding measurements are widths, and both ends of a width are places you can locate with your fingers. The shapes decided by length are the unreliable ones.
Glasses
Frames wider at the bottom, or rimless lower edges, balance a broad forehead against a narrow jaw.
Frame shape is the smaller half of the question — the sizes have to fit as well, and those are measurable. Find frame sizes that fit your face, or decode the numbers inside a pair you already own.
Hair
Volume at jaw level balances the taper. Height at the crown exaggerates it.
What each haircut does to these proportions, stated as geometry rather than as a verdict — filtered by what your hair texture can actually hold.
How to find out whether this is your face
Guessing from photographs is unreliable in a specific direction: people tend to pick whichever category they have read most about. Both of our tools report the ratio, the threshold it was compared against, and the runner-up shape when the call was close.
- Face shape detector — from a photo, measured in millimetres, corrected for head turn. Nothing is uploaded.
- Face shape from a tape measure — four measurements, no camera, and honest about which half of the answer a tape can deliver.
These categories are a convenience rather than a fact. Faces vary continuously across every measurement and the boundaries are lines drawn through that continuum, so a great many faces sit close enough to one that a small change in how the measurement is taken puts them in the next category along. Nothing here scores or ranks anyone's appearance.