What Eye Shape Do I Have? Measure the Three Parts That Decide It

Beauty brands use slightly different menus, but the same four questions sit underneath almost all of them. Clinique's eye-shape guide, for example, defines upturned, downturned, round, hooded, deep-set, close-set, wide-set and single-lid eyes, and each of those answers one of the questions below.

Look at the line from the inner corner of each eye to the outer corner. If the outer corner sits higher, the eye is upturned (a positive canthal tilt); if lower, downturned (negative); if level, neutral. Clinique's definitions put it the same way: upturned eyes have inner corners that dip and outer corners that lift, and downturned eyes the reverse.

This is the part of eye shape most easily faked by a photo. Tip your chin down and the outer corners rise in the picture; tip it up and they fall. FaceCheckup levels the line between your pupils and corrects slight head turns before measuring, then reports the angle with a ± range. Its style plan treats more than +2° as upturned and less than −2° as downturned, because smaller angles are within the landmark error.

For the record, upturned is the common case. Every published population average we found is positive, between about 1° and about 10°. The positive canthal tilt page charts all of them, and the canthal tilt guide shows how much head pose moves the number.

The makeup definition is simple. Clinique calls eyes close-set when there is less than one eye length between them, and wide-set when there is more. That is exactly what the scan's eye-spacing number measures: the gap between your inner eye corners divided by the average width of one eye. Below 1.0 means a gap narrower than an eye, above 1.0 a gap wider than an eye.

Here is the part quizzes leave out. Whether a typical face counts as close-set or wide-set by that rule depends heavily on which population you look at. Caliper studies measured the gap and the eye width directly, and the results swing from one side of 1.0 to the other:

This is about how tall your eye opening is compared with how long it is. Clinique describes round eyes as having a rounder shape, sometimes with white showing between the waterline and the iris. PureWow's mirror test for almond eyes is the mirror image of that: if your iris touches both the top and bottom waterline and no white shows above or below it, you have almond eyes.

FaceCheckup's eye openness number is the visible height of each eye divided by its width, averaged across both eyes. A higher number means a rounder opening. We don't draw a line between round and almond on that number, because we couldn't find a published population value for it measured the way our landmarks measure it, and inventing a threshold would be guessing. Use the number to compare photos of yourself, and the iris test to name the shape.

Expression changes this more than anything else on the list. A smile pushes the lower lid up and makes any eye look narrower and more almond; raised eyebrows open it and make it rounder. Take the photo with a relaxed face and your mouth closed.

The lid is where landmark scans stop being useful. MediaPipe places points along the edge of the lid, where it meets the eye, not along the crease or fold above it, so it cannot tell a hooded lid from an open one. Do this check instead, in a mirror at eye level, in daylight, with your face relaxed:

Your eye shape is the combination. “Upturned, slightly wide-set, almond, no hood” is a complete description, and it tells you more than a single label would. Most named shapes in quizzes are really one dominant feature: “hooded eyes” means the lid is the most noticeable thing, “downturned eyes” means the corners are, and so on.

Two combinations confuse people often enough to call out. Downturned plus hooded is common, and the hood can make a neutral eye look downturned; your scan's tilt number will tell you whether the corners actually slope. And close-set plus round can look very different from close-set plus almond, because a taller opening fills more of the space between the eyes. Neither combination needs fixing, but the makeup choices differ.

Every tip below comes from at least two independent professional sources in our rulebook (makeup brands' artist education, named makeup artists, established beauty press). These are conventions, not rules, and they are about emphasis, not correction.

Better than a quiz for the measured parts, and blind to the rest. Google's model card for the face landmarker reports an average error of 2.06% to 3.85% of the distance between the eyes, roughly 1.3 to 2.4 mm on an adult face. On a 30 mm eye, that is enough to move the tilt by about 2° and the spacing ratio by a few hundredths. FaceCheckup measures your photo and three slightly re-framed copies and shows the spread as a ± range, so you can see how firm each number is.

Camera distance matters as well. Close selfies enlarge the middle of the face; Ward and colleagues (2018) modelled a nose about 30% wider relative to face width at 12 inches than at 5 feet. The inner eye corners sit close to that centre, so prop the phone 1 to 1.5 m away. And take your glasses off: frames hide the corners, which is the reason US passport photos dropped glasses in 2016.

Run it again on a different photo before believing it. The most common surprise is a downturned reading on someone who has always thought of their eyes as upturned, and the cause is nearly always a raised chin or a camera held low. The second most common is “neutral” for someone with hooded eyes, which usually means the corners are level and the hood is doing the work.

Eye shape also changes over the years, mostly in the lid. EyeWiki, the American Academy of Ophthalmology's reference, describes loose upper-lid skin as a common sign of ageing that produces classic hooding. If a lid ever starts to droop over your pupil or get in the way of your vision, that is a question for an eye doctor, not a face scan. This site doesn't give medical advice.

For the brow side of the picture, the eyebrow shapes guide explains how brow height and tail position change the look of the eye, and the facial symmetry test shows how much your two eyes differ.