Triangle (pear) face shape
A jaw wider than typical and more than 2% wider than the forehead, so the widest part of the face sits at the bottom.
Also called pear.
Measure your own face shapeWhat the measurements say
Widest at the jaw, narrowing upward through the cheekbones to a narrower forehead.
The rule that produces it: Jaw wider than typical and more than 2% wider than the forehead.
A worked example
These are tape measurements that produce a triangle 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 | 110 mm |
|---|---|
| Face width at cheekbones | 140 mm |
| Jaw width | 126 mm |
| Hairline to chin | 190 mm |
| Ratio | This face | Typical |
|---|---|---|
| Length over width | 1.15 | 1.15 |
| Forehead over width | 0.79 | 0.86 |
| Jaw over width | 0.90 | 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.
Triangle or square?
Whether the jaw passes the forehead. Both have a wide jaw; a square jaw stays within the forehead's width, a triangle's exceeds it. Once the jaw is wider than the forehead by 2%, the widest point of the outline has moved downward, which is a different face.
What is worth knowing about it
Triangle is the least common result in this set and the most clear-cut when it appears. It requires the jaw to be wide in absolute terms — more than 4 points above the typical 80% of cheekbone width — and wider than the forehead. Most faces fail both conditions comfortably.
It is tested first of the six rules, before heart, diamond, oblong, square and round. Order matters in a rule chain, and a face that satisfies the triangle conditions would often satisfy the square ones too; testing triangle first means the widest-point-at-the-bottom reading wins, which is the more distinctive fact about the face.
Like heart and diamond, this is a width-decided category, so a tape measure identifies it about as reliably as a camera does. If you would rather not use a photograph, this is one of the three results you can trust from four measurements.
Glasses
Frames with weight at the top — a heavier brow bar, or cat-eye shapes — balance a wider 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 above the ears and at the crown. Weight at the jaw adds to the widest part.
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.