Do I Have High Cheekbones? Measure Where Yours Sit

The scanner traces the outline of your face with Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker and straightens it so your pupils sit level. It then walks down the outline on both sides, from a little above the pupil line to the corners of the mouth, and finds where the face is widest measured from its centre line. That height becomes your cheekbone height: where the widest point sits between the pupils (0%) and the mouth corners (100%).

A low number, such as 15%, means the face reaches its full width close to eye level, which is what people mean by high cheekbones. A higher number means the widest point sits further down the face, which reads as lower or fuller cheeks. Because the search window starts slightly above the pupils, a very high widest point can even show as a small negative number.

Open the Jaw group in your results and switch on the Widths layer. You will see the cheekbone width line drawn between the outline landmarks at cheekbone level; the height result itself is reported as a number, not drawn as a separate line. If the outline lands in the wrong place, for example because hair covers the side of your face, you can see that straight away and retake the photo.

We looked for a published population range for cheekbone height measured this way and did not find one. The large anthropometric surveys measure cheekbone width, not the vertical level of the widest point, and the clinical literature describes cheekbone position with bone landmarks you can't see on a photo. So the tool shows your number on its own, with no 'average' beside it. Any site that tells you your cheekbones are 'in the top 10%' is making that figure up.

Cheekbone width is well documented. In the US Army's ANSUR II survey of 6,068 adults, bizygomatic breadth (the distance between the cheekbones) averaged 142.6 mm in men and 133.8 mm in women, calculated by us from the public data. Caton and Dixson (2022) found it highly sexually dimorphic in that sample, with an equivalent effect size of d = 1.39. Width and height are separate questions, though: a face can be wide at the cheekbones and still be widest low down.

Users on looksmaxxing forums point out that 'high' and 'low' get unreliable on long faces, and they are right. If your face is long from eyes to mouth, the same bone sits at a lower percentage than on a shorter face. That's one reason we report a share of the eye-to-mouth distance rather than a pixel height, and why the face-shape result, which accounts for length, is worth reading alongside this one.

'High cheekbones' gets used for three different things. One is height: how close to the eyes the face is widest. Another is prominence, meaning the cheekbones are clearly wider than the forehead and jaw, which is what makes a diamond face shape. The last is overall face width against the height of the midface, the facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) used in research. FaceCheckup reports all three separately, so you can see which one your friends mean when they comment on your cheekbones.

Makeup artists place colour by face shape rather than by cheekbone height alone, so start from your face-shape result. These are makeup-artist conventions, each backed by at least two brand or editorial sources (L'Oréal Paris, Charlotte Tilbury, Trinny London, Patrick Ta, e.l.f., Maybelline and AARP).

Round face: put blush high on the cheekbones and blend it up toward the temple instead of on the centre of the apples, and place contour in the hollows under the cheekbones, at the temples and along the jaw, with highlight down the centre. Lifted, angled colour is the classic way to suggest higher cheekbones.

Diamond face, where the cheekbones are already the widest point: contour lightly on the outer cheekbones and along the temples, keep highlight in the centre of the forehead and chin, and put blush on the tops of the cheekbones blended out toward the ears.

Heart face: sweep blush in a 'C' from the top of the cheekbone up toward the end of the brow, add a little contour under the cheekbones and at the temples, and keep it off the jaw. Oblong face: keep cheek contour and blush horizontal rather than in steep diagonals, because a horizontal line adds width to a long face. Square face: blush on the apples, blended outward, softens the corners.

If your cheekbones are the widest part of your face, opticians and stylists give consistent advice, and the camera changes how cheekbones look more than anything else. Pick the items that match your result, then rescan with the same setup to compare. If you also want a read on the rest of the lower face, the jawline rating page covers jaw width and the jaw corner, and the face shape detector puts all three widths together.