Is My Forehead Big? A Big Forehead Test That Measures It

When people say a forehead is big, they usually mean one of two things. Tall: the distance from the hairline down to the brows is long compared with the rest of the face. Wide: the forehead is broad at the temples compared with the cheekbones. A forehead can be one without the other, and they call for different styling.

Online, the most common test is the finger rule: lay your fingers flat between your brows and hairline and count. It's quick, but fingers vary in width from person to person, and it says nothing about how your forehead compares with the rest of your face, which is what people actually notice.

FaceCheckup measures proportions instead. Upper third is your hairline-to-brow-line distance as a percentage of hairline-to-chin length. Forehead width ÷ cheekbone width is the width across your temples as a percentage of the width at your cheekbones. Both come with a ± range from four slightly different framings of your photo.

So when you check for a big forehead on FaceCheckup, look at both numbers: a high upper-third share, a high forehead-to-cheekbone width, or both. That matters because the styling advice below differs for each.

Researchers who measure faces with calipers report the forehead as the distance from the hairline (trichion) to the nasal root (nasion). Their numbers make one thing clear: the upper third is normally one of the two longest parts of the face, and it varies more from person to person than any other third.

Where your hair starts can change over the years, and that changes how big a forehead looks. The scan finds your hairline with a hair-segmentation model, walking up the centre of your face until it reaches hair. So it measures where hair starts in this photo, and it can't tell whether that hairline has always been there or has moved. A high reading can reflect hair rather than face.

Two other things move the reading. A widow's peak dips lower in the centre, and because the scan measures on the midline, it will read a shorter upper third than the corners of your hairline suggest. Bangs or a fringe will be found as the hairline itself, so pull them back for the measurement.

If you're worried about hair loss, that's a question for a doctor or dermatologist, not a face scan. This site doesn't give medical advice.

Here is the Thirds layer on a public-domain painting, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, so you can see exactly what the scan draws. It marks the hairline found by the hair-segmentation model, the brow line, the base of the nose and the chin.

On this image the scan put the upper third at 41% of face length, the middle third at 35% and the lower third at 24%. The photo check also flagged her head as turned 17° and her chin as down 19°, which is enough to request a retake. A lowered chin shortens the lower third on camera, so these numbers describe the painting's pose as much as the face. Treat your own result the same way: take a level, straight-on photo before reading anything into it.

Foreheads are where photos lie the most. A phone held close enlarges whatever is nearest the lens, so a high, close selfie puts your forehead nearest and makes it dominate. Ward and colleagues (2018) showed how strongly short distances distort the centre of the face, which is why our research-supported rule is to shoot from about 1 to 1.5 m away.

You never have to hide your forehead. Plenty of people wear theirs proudly with slicked-back hair. But if you'd like it to look smaller in photos and day to day, these are the suggestions in our sourced rulebook, each backed by at least two professional sources and labelled with the trade it comes from.

One honest note on fringes for men. Barbers quoted in our rulebook tell men with oval or square faces to skip heavy fringes because they shorten the face, while women's stylists recommend fringes more widely. If your face is also short or round, a full fringe may not be the right trade-off; a side-swept one usually is.

If you're here because someone joked about your big forehead, the jokes say more about how memorable foreheads are than about yours. Foreheads sit at the top of every photo and every video call, so they get noticed, and a high-angle selfie makes them look larger still. A measured number from a fair photo is a better guide than the worry.

Your upper third is the part of your face that varies most between people, partly because hairlines vary so much. That's why a number that looks high next to a friend's may be perfectly ordinary across a population. The scan shows it as a plain number for this reason: the published norms measure from a different point (the nasal root), so labelling your value normal or abnormal against them would be guesswork.

Forehead height also has a knock-on effect on one of the two ratios our Balance Score uses. Eyes-to-mouth ÷ face length (Pallett, Link and Lee's 36%) uses hairline-to-chin length, so a taller forehead lowers it by definition. Read that ratio as approximate if your hairline is high.

And remember what the research says about attractiveness as a whole: private taste counts about as much as shared taste (Hönekopp, 2006). Measuring your forehead tells you how to style it. It doesn't tell you what anyone else thinks of it. For the rest of your proportions, see our facial thirds page, and for haircuts by shape, the face shape detector.