Oblong Face Shape: Long, Straight-Sided, and Easy to Style

Four professional sources agree on the core. Matrix, L'Oréal's professional salon brand: “An oblong shape face is longer than it is wide.” Revlon Professional: “The length is longer than the width of the face.” All About Vision, reviewed by a certified optician: “longer than it is wide, with a long, straight cheek line.” The Art of Manliness, written with barber Thad Forrester, gives the most useful version, quoted below.

That makes two checks. Is your face clearly long? And are your forehead, cheekbones and jaw close to the same width, so the outline doesn't taper much above or below the cheekbones? A face that is long but tapers to a rounded chin is oval. A face that is long and straight-sided is oblong. If the jaw corner is also sharp and square, many stylists call it rectangle; TODAY's panel of stylists defines it as a square jaw on “a face that's longer than it is wide.”

What the definitions do not say is just as useful. None of them requires high or low cheekbones, and none requires a wide forehead. Cheekbone height is a separate measurement; our high cheekbones guide covers it. The oblong question is only about length and how evenly the three widths line up.

This is the question most people with a long face are really asking, and the honest answer is that no professional source draws the line with a number. Hairstylist Paul Labrecque's rule that an oval face is about one and a half times as long as it is wide is the only figure in print, and it is a rule of thumb for oval, not a cut-off for oblong. Any website that gives an exact oval-to-oblong threshold made it up or took it from its own app.

So we publish ours. FaceCheckup's face shape detector compares your face with a reference point for each shape. On our scale, length divided by cheekbone width is 1.17 for the oval reference and 1.31 for the oblong reference. If the rest of your face is typical, a ratio around 1.24 sits halfway, and the detector will show oval and oblong with similar percentages. Our length runs from the top of the face mesh on the upper forehead to the chin, not from the hairline, so these numbers are smaller than tape-measure ratios and can't be compared with them directly.

Width matters as well as length. The oblong reference also has a wider jaw relative to the cheekbones (0.80 against 0.77 for oval), which is the straight-sides trait in number form. So two faces of the same length can land differently: the one whose jaw stays wide is more oblong, the one whose jaw tapers is more oval.

If you are between the two, you are in good company. One of the questions behind this page came from a Quora user who described a mix of oval and oblong and felt that only a high ponytail and a side braid suited them. That is a common experience on the boundary: advice written for one shape doesn't quite fit. The practical answer is to start with the advice both shapes share, which is below.

All the hair advice for a long face follows one principle: add width, not height. Every item below is a stylist convention with at least two professional sources in our rulebook, from Matrix, Revlon Professional, Huda Beauty, Cosmopolitan, The Seattle Times' Aveda educator and The Art of Manliness.

If you want to keep long hair, you don't have to cut it to suit an oblong face shape. The rules above work on any length: ask for face-framing layers that begin around the cheekbones so the hair widens there, add a fringe to brow level, and wear a side part instead of a sleek centre part. Waves or curls, whether natural or styled, do the widening for you. What stylists warn against is the combination of very long, flat, one-length hair and an exposed forehead, because together they draw one long vertical line.

When you book, describe the effect you want rather than the face shape: width at the cheekbones and jaw, less height on top, and a fringe that reaches your brows. A stylist can deliver that in many cuts, from a textured bob to long layers.

The same width-not-height idea runs through every other choice. The table collects the rules from our rulebook, each with the trade it comes from. Opticians at All About Vision and Reliant Medical Group agree on frames, makeup artists from Fox News' brow panel to HighBrow Beauty agree on brows, and photographers at SLR Lounge, The Lens Lounge and StudioBinder agree on light.

The photo rule is worth knowing even if you never change your hair. Broad lighting means turning the lit side of your face toward the camera, so the wider, brighter part of the face is what the lens sees. Short lighting, where the shadowed side faces the camera, makes faces look narrower and longer, which is the opposite of what a long face wants.

Because the oval and oblong boundary is a matter of degree, measure before you restyle. Prop your phone about 1 to 1.5 m away at eye level, use the timer, pull your hair back, take your glasses off and keep your mouth closed. Distance matters more than people expect for length: a camera very close to the face exaggerates whatever is nearest the lens, and photographers advise keeping the camera at or slightly above eye level, never below the chin. Ward and colleagues (2018) modelled that a camera about 30 cm away makes the base of the nose look roughly 30% wider relative to face width than at 1.5 m, and the same perspective effect changes every ratio a shape tool measures.

Run the face shape detector and switch on the Outline and Widths layers. Look at whether the jaw line is nearly as long as the cheekbone line. (The Face length ÷ width number in your results runs from the hairline, so it is larger than the 1.17 and 1.31 references, which use the top of the face mesh; don't compare them directly.) Read the two closest shapes. Oblong with a clear lead: the table above is your list. Oblong and oval close together: start with the advice the two shapes share, a fringe to brow level and soft side volume. Oblong and square close together: you have the rectangle variant, so add the square-face habit of keeping hair soft below the jaw. If the quality check asks for a retake because your chin is tipped up or down, take it seriously, because chin angle changes measured length directly.

Then pick one change for this week, not five. If you have long, straight hair, ask for face-framing layers that start at the cheekbones and a fringe that grazes the brows. If you wear glasses, try a deeper frame at your next fitting. If you mostly care about photos, turn toward the window. Each one works on its own, and each is easy to undo. For a side-by-side of cuts across all shapes, see hairstyle for face shape; men can find barber and beard advice by shape in male face shapes.