Heart Shaped Face: How to Tell, and What Suits It

Stylists and opticians describe the heart shape with three cues. You don't need all three to be dramatic; you need them to point the same way.

The first and most important cue is width at the top. L'Oréal Paris gives the simplest home test of any source we read: if your brows are noticeably wider than your jaw, you have a heart-shaped face. Zenni's optometrist Dr. Catherine Ong describes a broad forehead with cheekbones tapering to a smaller jaw, and Susan Tarrant, writing in the optical trade journal Eyecare Business, says the face is widest at the forehead and narrows at the chin.

The second cue is a narrow jaw. In a heart shape the jaw corners sit well inside the line of the forehead and cheekbones, so the sides of the face run inward as they go down. The third cue is the chin, which is usually small or pointed. A widow's peak often gets mentioned too, but none of the definitions we rely on require one, so treat it as a common companion rather than a test.

Length is not part of the definition. A heart shaped face can be fairly short or fairly long; what matters is the taper from top to bottom. InStyle alone calls it wider than long, which conflicts with every other definition, so we don't use that.

Most people who search for this shape are really asking a comparison question: is my face heart shaped or oval? The table below lines up the four shapes it gets confused with, using the same three widths and the chin. The last column shows the reference points our classifier uses. Those are our settings, anchored on Google's canonical face model and shifted in the direction each stylist definition describes. They are not population averages, and nobody has published a population average for face shapes that we could verify.

The one naming trap worth knowing: 'triangle' means opposite things in different guides. Matrix groups heart and triangle together as narrow at the chin, while opticians (All About Vision, Eyecare Business, Zenni) use triangle, or pear, for a jaw that is wider than the forehead. We follow the opticians, so on FaceCheckup triangle is the upside-down heart.

Eyeballing a mirror works poorly for this shape because the decisive difference is a few percent of width at the temples and jaw. Our scanner measures it instead. It finds 478 landmarks on your photo with Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker, entirely on your device, and reads four numbers: forehead width as a share of cheekbone width, jaw width as a share of cheekbone width, face length against width, and the front-view angle at the jaw corner.

Those four numbers are compared with seven reference points, one per shape, and the distances are turned into percentages. You see the closest shape first with its percentage, then the next two closest with theirs, so a borderline face reads as 'heart, with oval close behind' rather than a flat label. Under it the scanner prints your actual forehead and jaw percentages and your jaw angle, so you can check the call yourself against the table above. If heart and oval are close, believe both: many faces genuinely sit between two shapes, and the styling advice for the two overlaps more than it differs.

To read it on the result screen, open the Face shape group and switch on the Outline and Widths layers. The three width lines are drawn on your own photo. If the top line is clearly the longest and the bottom line clearly the shortest, that's the heart pattern. Every number carries a ± range, which is the spread across your photo and three re-framed copies of it. A wide range means the photo, not your face, is the uncertain part.

For a clean reading, pull your hair back off your forehead and away from your jaw (stylist convention: hair over the hairline or jaw hides the outline), take your glasses off, keep a neutral closed mouth, and prop the phone about 1 to 1.5 m away at eye level with the timer. The quality check asks for a retake if your head is turned more than 15°, your chin is tipped more than 18°, your face is too small in the frame or the photo is very dark, and warns about smaller problems such as a tilted head.

Every stylist source in our rulebook works from the same idea: add width and softness where the face is narrow (the jaw and chin) and avoid adding more where it is already wide (the forehead and temples). All of the points below are labelled stylist convention. They describe what working stylists recommend, not something research has tested.

If you want bangs, the clear favorite is a soft fringe that runs at an angle. Matrix's Jackie Summers recommends soft, side-sweeping bangs that help narrow a wider forehead, and stylist Edmondo Blando, quoted by TODAY, uses them to soften a top-heavy, wider forehead. Curtain bangs that are a little longer at the outer edges do the same job. Heavy, blunt, straight-across bangs are the one cut two independent sources (Matrix and the Seattle Times) tell heart shapes to avoid, because a solid horizontal block emphasizes the width of the forehead. We found no credible stylist source recommending them for heart faces.

Makeup artists agree less about brows than stylists agree about hair, so treat brow advice as a starting point. Maybelline recommends a soft, rounded, low arch to balance heart features; Rush Hair & Beauty suggests round brows to soften the face; Refinery29, quoting brow artists Joey Healy and Jared Bailey, says tapered brows suit heart-shaped faces with sharper features. The point they share is a gentle curve with a tapered tail, and no very heavy, ultra-bold brow. Anastasia Soare, quoted by Fox News, goes the other way and prefers keeping an arch rather than a straight brow, so if you naturally have an arch, you don't need to flatten it.

Blush follows the same balancing logic. Makeup artist Roberto Rodriguez, writing for L'Oréal Paris, suggests sweeping blush in a 'C' shape from the tops of the cheekbones up to just above the tail of the brow. For contour, Maybelline, Patrick Ta Beauty and AARP's makeup artists all put the shading at the temples and sides of the forehead, with a little under the cheekbones and only a touch at the very tip of the chin. They skip contour along the jaw, because shading an already narrow jaw narrows it further. All of these are makeup-artist conventions.

Opticians have the most consistent advice of any group here. All About Vision and Reliant Medical Group's optician both recommend frame shapes that are wider at the bottom, and Vision Express calls the same idea bottom-heavy frames. Weight low on the frame balances a wide forehead and narrow chin. Thin, light-colored or rimless frames are the other safe route, because they keep attention off the broad upper third (All About Vision, Glasses Direct, Vision Express). Oval frames are a sensible first try; Glasses Direct notes they don't overemphasize the cheekbones.

What to avoid is the mirror image: heavy, decorated top bars and browline frames, which add width where the face is already widest. WebMD names aviators as a top pick for heart faces while other guides don't mention them, so aviators are worth trying on rather than buying blind. These are optician conventions.

For beards, barbers quoted by FashionBeans suggest keeping the cheeks short, close to stubble, and leaving more length on the chin and moustache. Philips frames the goal as giving more weight to the jaw. The two disagree on full beards: FashionBeans says avoid one, Philips says a short or full beard can work. If you can grow a full beard evenly, the safer version is fuller at the chin and lighter on the cheeks, never puffed out at the sides.

Start with what you can reverse tonight.