High cheekbones vs low cheekbones: what sets them, and what actually moves them

High cheekbones means the most prominent point of the cheekbone sits high on the face, close to the lower eyelid, rather than down near the level of the nostrils. Low cheekbones peak lower. That is the whole definition, and it is not a clinical one — there is no scale a doctor reads it off, and no landmark in anthropometry called "high cheekbone".

The trouble is that the phrase gets used for three different measurements at once: how high the peak sits, how wide the cheekbones are, and how far they project forward. They vary independently, they show up differently in a photo, and — the part almost every article skips — they respond to completely different things. This guide separates them, shows you how to tell which you have, and goes option by option through what each one actually moves.

What high cheekbones actually means

The cheekbone is mostly the zygomatic bone, joined at the front to the maxilla, the upper jaw. Run a finger from just below the outer corner of your eye back toward the top of your ear and you are tracing its body and then its arch. The most prominent part — the point that catches light and casts a shadow beneath it — is the malar eminence, and when people say someone has high cheekbones, they are describing where that point sits vertically.

Anthropometry, the science of measuring faces, does measure the cheekbones, but not as "high" or "low". It records bizygomatic width, the distance between the two widest points of the cheekbone arches (the zygion points), and it describes malar projection in profile. The everyday word blends both with height, which is why two people can look at the same face and disagree about whether its cheekbones are high.

High vs low cheekbones: height, width and projection

The most common mix-up is low versus flat. A low cheekbone peaks further down the face; a flat cheekbone projects very little, wherever its peak sits. A face can have low but well-projected cheekbones — a strong curve that simply begins lower — or high cheekbones that are barely visible in profile. When someone says their cheekbones "disappear", they almost always mean projection or contrast, not height.

Width is the other impostor. A face that is widest at the cheekbones, narrowing toward both the forehead and the jaw, is what face-shape charts call a diamond face. Those cheekbones often *read* as high because the narrow temples above them exaggerate the curve, but diamond describes width against the rest of the face, and says nothing about where the peak sits.

How to tell if you have high or low cheekbones

You need about two minutes, a mirror and one light. Do it with your hair pulled back and no bronzer or contour on — makeup is designed to fake the exact line you are looking for.

1. 1Find the bone. Place your fingertips just below the outer corner of each eye and press gently. Slide back toward your ears along the hard ridge; that ridge is the zygomatic arch.
2. 2Find the peak. Move your fingers forward again until you reach the most prominent point, where the bone feels fullest. Keep a finger there.
3. 3Compare it to two landmarks. Look in the mirror. If the peak is closer to your lower eyelid than to the base of your nose, your cheekbones are high. If it sits roughly level with your nostrils or below, they are low. Between the two is, unsurprisingly, the most common answer.
4. 4Check with light. Stand under a single light directly above you — a ceiling light in a bathroom works — and look straight ahead. The shadow begins just under the most prominent part of the bone. A shadow that starts close under the eye confirms high cheekbones.
5. 5Repeat smiling. Smile broadly and watch the shadow move. It rises because the cheek tissue bunches up, not because the bone moved — which is the next section's point, and the reason to judge from a neutral face.

What this test cannot tell you is projection, because a front view has no depth. For that, take a photo at three-quarters or in profile at eye level, with the camera at least an arm's length away. Close-up phone photos widen the middle of the face and flatten its depth, so a selfie taken at 30 centimetres is the worst possible evidence about your cheekbones.

What decides cheekbone height: the bone underneath

Cheekbone height is skeletal. It is set by the shape of the zygomatic bone and the maxilla and by how the midface grew, which is largely inherited. A mixed-longitudinal study of 458 Colombian children and adolescents aged 6 to 17 measured bizygomatic width among eight craniofacial dimensions: all of them increased over that period, and males were generally larger and grew faster. In boys, most measurements showed an adolescent growth spurt — facial width was the exception, its yearly growth slowing steadily with age.

Once growth is complete the bone does not enlarge in response to use. That settles most of the internet's questions before they start: exercises, massage, chewing and tongue posture act on muscle, fat and skin, not on the position of the cheekbone's peak. The only things that change the bone itself in an adult are surgery and, slowly, ageing — and ageing works in the wrong direction.

Do cheekbones differ by ancestry?

Facial proportions do vary between populations, and the widely cited evidence for this is an international study that measured 1,470 young adults from European, Middle Eastern, Asian and African-origin groups on 14 measurements and compared them with North American norms. It found horizontal measurements differed from those norms more often than vertical ones, and it described itself as preliminary, with small samples per group. It did not produce a ranking of which groups have "high cheekbones", and neither does this page — the lists circulating online are stereotypes with no measurement behind them. Within any group, individual faces span the whole range.

Why the same cheekbones can read high or flat: fat, skin and light

If height is bone, why does the same person's cheekbone look sharp in one photo and invisible in another? Because you never see bone. You see the soft tissue draped over it, and that tissue is layered, mobile and changeable.

Rohrich and Pessa's 2007 anatomical work showed that facial fat is not one continuous blanket but a set of separate compartments, divided by thin septa. In the cheek there are superficial compartments just under the skin, and deeper fat lying closer to the bone that helps push the front of the cheek forward. How much fat sits in each, and where, shapes the contour that people read as cheekbones.

Facial fat also changes how a face is judged overall, not just the cheekbones. Coetzee and colleagues showed in 2009 that perceived facial adiposity — how heavy a face looks — predicted how healthy and attractive it was rated, and was linked to measures of cardiovascular health and reported infections. That study was about apparent weight in the face, not about cheekbones specifically, but it explains why the hollow under the cheekbone carries so much visual weight.

Light is doing half the work

Cheekbones are perceived almost entirely through shadow. A single light above and slightly in front of the face drops a soft shadow just below the malar eminence, and that shadow edge is what the eye reads as a high cheekbone. Flat light from directly in front — a ring light, an on-camera flash, an overcast window facing you — fills that shadow in and makes any face look broader and flatter. None of this changes a measurement. It changes what the photo tells a viewer, and it is the reason nobody should judge their cheekbones from a single flash photo.

High cheekbones on men and women

It is common to read that wide cheekbones are a masculine signal, usually via the facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR): bizygomatic width divided by upper face height. The idea came from skulls, where men show a larger ratio. But Kramer, Jones and Ward tested it in living faces in 2012, across three White European samples, measuring the same people with 2D photographs, 3D scans and tape anthropometry. The three methods agreed closely with each other — and they found no sex difference in facial width-to-height ratio, despite enough statistical power to detect one. The ratio did track body mass index in both sexes.

So prominent cheekbones are not, on the evidence, a sex-specific trait. What differs between typical male and female faces is the frame around them — the jaw, the brow ridge, the lower face — and that frame changes how the same cheekbones read.

High cheekbones in men

In men the cheekbones sit in competition with the jaw. A wide jaw directly below them makes the face read as square and the cheekbones as less distinct; a jaw noticeably narrower than the cheekbones makes them the widest, most visible feature. A beard shifts this further: a full beard adds width at the jaw and hides the hollow below the cheekbone, while a beard kept short on the cheeks and fuller at the chin lets the cheekbones stand out. Short hair also removes the cue at the temples, which is why men with prominent cheekbones are often told they have an oval face when a tape measure says diamond.

Cunningham, Barbee and Pike's 1990 studies of male faces are the source most often cited here. Across three quasi-experiments, men with what the authors called mature features — prominent cheekbones and a large chin — were rated more attractive, along with men who had large eyes, a big smile and high-status clothing. It is one of the few studies to name cheekbones explicitly, and like most attractiveness research of its time it rested on photo ratings of a limited set of faces.

High cheekbones in women

In women the question is usually about makeup, because contour is designed to imitate exactly the shadow that high cheekbones produce. The logic follows from the anatomy above: shade goes just under the most prominent point of the bone, blended back toward the top of the ear rather than down toward the mouth; highlight goes on the top of the bone; and blush goes on the fullest part of the cheek or slightly above it. Placing contour too low draws a false cheekbone below your real one and makes the face look longer.

Is a high cheekbone a feminine feature? Not by any measurement cited above. It is a feature that many conventions of beauty photography and makeup emphasise in women, which is a different thing.

Are high cheekbones attractive? What the studies measured

The research does point in one direction, with limits. Beyond the 1990 male-face studies, Woo and colleagues in 2020 took 3D reconstructions of one young Chinese man and one young Chinese woman, both with average cheek projection, and digitally moved the cheekbone and the jaws 4 millimetres forward or back. Over a hundred dental students then rated the resulting faces. A neutral or forward cheekbone position was rated more attractive than a set-back one, in both faces, and the most attractive combination was a neutral cheekbone with the jaws set 4 millimetres back.

Notice what that study measured: projection, the axis a front photo cannot see, in two faces, rated by students training in a field that works on faces. It is careful, and it is narrow. It does not say high cheekbones make a face attractive; it says moving one face's cheekbones backward made it less so.

Faces are judged as wholes. Averageness — how close a face is to the population average — and even, healthy-looking skin were each found to predict attractiveness ratings on their own, and no single feature has been shown to outweigh them.— Summarised from Langlois & Roggman, 1990, and Fink, Grammer & Matts, 2006

The practical reading: prominent cheekbones are a plus in the studies that isolated them, but the studies isolated them precisely because in real faces they never appear alone. If you want to know how your features work together, measure them together — facial proportions covers what those measurements can and cannot say.

Why cheekbones look higher when you smile

The zygomaticus major muscle runs from the cheekbone down to the corner of the mouth. When it contracts, it pulls the mouth corner up and back, and the soft tissue of the cheek has nowhere to go but up and outward, bunching over the bone into the rounded shape usually called the apples of the cheeks. A genuine smile recruits the muscle that circles the eye as well — the combination Ekman and colleagues studied as the Duchenne smile, which they found occurred more during enjoyment than other smiles.

The result: nearly everyone looks higher-cheekboned smiling than neutral. This is why comparing a smiling photo of someone else with your own passport photo is not a comparison of cheekbones, and it is also, bluntly, the cheapest cheekbone "treatment" that exists. If the goal is a photo, smile.

How high cheekbones age: bone, fat and the midface

The midface ages in two places at once. Shaw and Kahn's 2007 three-dimensional CT study of 60 people in three age groups found that the maxillary angle decreased significantly with age in both men and women — the upper jaw, which forms the front of the cheek, loses projection — while the opening around the nose widened. Mendelson and Wong's 2012 review described the same pattern of targeted bone resorption across the facial skeleton. In the soft tissue, Gierloff's 2012 CT study measured the cheek fat compartments shifting downward and redistributing with age.

Put together, that means the scaffold recedes while the tissue on it slides. A cheekbone that starts out high and well projected keeps holding tissue forward for longer, which is the mechanism behind the common observation that such faces age well. Nobody has run the direct comparison, though, so treat it as reasoning from anatomy rather than a finding. The same process drives the deepening of the fold beside the nose, covered in detail in nasolabial folds.

How to get higher cheekbones: what each option really moves

Start with the sentence nothing else on this topic will say plainly: no option short of surgery changes the height of the cheekbone. What the options below change is width, projection, or the contrast and shadow around the bone. That is not a reason to dismiss them — contrast is most of what people see — but it is the reason to know which axis you are paying for.

Body fat and the contrast under the cheekbone

Losing body fat is the one natural change that reliably alters how cheekbones look, because the superficial cheek fat and the buccal fat both shrink with weight loss and the hollow below the bone deepens. That is contrast, not height, and it has a ceiling: the deep cheek fat that holds the front of the cheek forward thins too, and in a lean or older face too much loss reads as gaunt rather than sculpted.

You will see specific body-fat percentages quoted for "visible cheekbones". They are not taken from any study, faces carry fat very differently at the same percentage, and chasing a number for your face is a reliable route to disordered eating. This page does not give one. If weight loss is a health goal for you, cheekbones are a side effect, not a target.

Facial exercises and cheek fullness

The study behind most exercise claims is Alam and colleagues' 2018 pilot in JAMA Dermatology: middle-aged women followed a 30-minute daily programme for eight weeks and then every other day for twelve more, and blinded dermatologists rating photographs scored upper and lower cheek fullness higher at the end. It had no control group and was a pilot. A 2014 systematic review of facial exercise for rejuvenation found the evidence insufficient to draw conclusions.

Read carefully, the most that evidence supports is a possible small change in how full the cheek looks. Fullness is not height, and a bigger muscle does not lift a bone. The full picture of what exercise has and has not shown is in facial asymmetry exercises.

Gua sha, rollers and microcurrent

The best evidence here is better than for exercise. In Ahn and colleagues' 2025 randomised trial, 34 women used a gua sha tool or a facial roller for ten minutes, five days a week, for eight weeks; both groups showed small reductions in measured facial surface distances, gua sha through muscle tone and the roller through skin elasticity. That is a contour effect, applied evenly, and it does not describe the cheekbone.

The claim that gua sha "increases microcirculation by 400%" comes from a different study: Nielsen and colleagues' 2007 pilot measured a fourfold increase in surface blood flow for the first 7.5 minutes after a single treatment — on the backs of 11 healthy staff volunteers, using the traditional scraping method that intentionally raises bruise-like marks. It was a study of pain relief. It says nothing about faces or cheekbones. Microcurrent devices are sold heavily in this space, and several of the pages ranking for these searches are written by device sellers; independent controlled evidence for cheekbone contour is thin.

Contour, hair and beard: changing where the shadow falls

These are free, instant and fully reversible, and they work on the axis people actually see. Contour places the shadow; highlight marks the peak; hair that falls at or just below the cheekbone frames it, while volume at the cheeks hides it; a beard kept short on the upper cheek shows the hollow. None of it changes a measurement. The face shape pages go through placement for each outline, because where contour belongs depends on whether your face is widest at the cheekbones or elsewhere.

Filler, fat grafting and implants

Injectable filler adds projection and volume over the cheekbone, and it is the most studied non-surgical option. In one randomised, evaluator-blind trial of 60 adults with moderate to severe midface volume deficit, a hyaluronic acid filler improved scores on a validated midface volume scale by almost two points at one month, whether placed by cannula or needle, with mostly mild injection-site reactions. That trial was run in age-related volume loss, and it compared two ways of injecting the same product rather than filler against no treatment.

Injection in the midface carries a small risk of filler entering a blood vessel, and serious complications, including to vision, have been reported after facial filler. The decision about product, depth and whether to do it at all belongs to a qualified clinician who has examined your face. Surgical options — fat grafting, malar implants, and osteotomies that reposition the zygoma — add projection more permanently. There is also the reverse: reduction malarplasty narrows a wide or prominent zygoma, and a 2023 meta-analysis of 29 studies and 6,611 patients compared its techniques and complication rates. If you want to see what added midface volume would look like on your own face before speaking to anyone, the cheek filler simulation renders it from a photo — as an illustration, not a prediction of any clinician's result.

Buccal fat removal: contrast, not height

Buccal fat removal is often sold as a cheekbone procedure. It is not one. It removes part of a fat pad that sits below and behind the cheekbone, which deepens the hollow under the bone and so increases contrast; the bone and its peak stay exactly where they were. It is also permanent.

The evidence is weaker than its popularity suggests. A 2021 systematic review found only four studies to include, called the evidence scarce and of low quality, and noted a lack of long-term follow-up. A 2025 meta-analysis of 12 studies and 308 patients found that one in four patients had some complication — mostly swelling, restricted mouth opening and pain, with asymmetry and rare facial nerve paralysis also recorded — and concluded the procedure should be recommended with caution. Because long-term data are missing, whether removal changes how a face ages is unknown. The buccal fat removal simulation shows the contrast effect on your own photo.

Mewing, "zygos" and bone smashing

In looksmaxxing communities the cheekbones are "zygos", and the promise is that tongue posture (mewing), hard chewing or pressure will make them grow. None of these has any evidence of changing the adult zygomatic bone, which has finished growing. The practice to name directly is bone smashing — deliberately striking the face to provoke bone to remodel. A 2026 analysis of looksmaxxing trends in an oral and maxillofacial surgery journal classed it among dangerous practices, and there is no clinical evidence it reshapes bone. It is injury, and facial fractures do not heal into better cheekbones; they heal into asymmetry.

What a photo can and cannot tell you about your cheekbones

A straight-on photo taken at arm's length, in even light, measures one cheekbone axis well: width, and how that width compares to the jaw and forehead. It measures height only indirectly, through shadow, which lighting controls. It cannot measure projection at all, and it cannot tell bone from fat — the two look identical from the front.

That is exactly what our tool reports and does not report. Jawline Rating measures bigonial width — across the jaw corners — against the widest point of your face at the cheekbones, and shows the ratio. The cheekbone point it uses is the widest point of the face outline in the photo, which approximates the anthropometric zygion rather than locating it on bone. It does not report cheekbone height or projection, and neither does any other tool on this site.

The cheekbone claims, checked

Cheekbones in the context of your whole face

Cheekbones matter mostly in relation to what surrounds them. The same bizygomatic width reads as dramatic above a narrow jaw and ordinary above a wide one; the same peak looks high under a narrow temple and unremarkable under a full one. That relationship is what face shape describes: a face widest at the cheekbones with a narrower forehead and jaw is a diamond, one that steps down gently is oval, and one widest at the forehead is heart-shaped.

If you have followed the tests above, you already know more about your cheekbones than a single score could tell you: where the peak sits, whether the contrast is bone or fat, and which of the options would move anything at all. The last useful number is how your cheekbone width sits against the rest of your face.