Jawline Rating Test
This measures your jawline from a single photo: how wide your jaw sits against your cheekbones, how sharply it tapers to your chin, how evenly the two sides match, and the jaw angle as it projects onto the front of your face. It also says plainly which of those numbers is a real measurement and which is an approximation, because the one everybody searches for is the approximation.
- No signup
- No upload
- Free
- ~10 seconds
Click to choose a photo, or drop one here
Straight-on, even lighting, at arm's length gives the most comparable reading.
No photo to hand? Try one of these and see what the tool returns.
Runs in your browser. Your photo is never uploaded.
What is a good gonial angle?
In adults the gonial angle typically measures between 110 and 130 degrees on a lateral radiograph, with lower values reading as a more defined jaw. It is measured from the side, not the front: the angle sits between the ascending ramus and the body of the mandible, and a face-on photograph has no depth axis on which to place it.
- The gonial angle is read from a lateral cephalogram in orthodontics, not from a photograph.
- It opens with age as the mandible remodels, so the same person measures a wider angle at seventy than at twenty.
- Bigonial width — the distance between the two jaw corners — is a standard anthropometric measure and does read from the front.
- Soft tissue over the jaw varies with body fat, so two people with identical bone can have visibly different jawlines.
How this jawline rating is measured
Four numbers come out of your photo. The first is bigonial width against bizygomatic width — the distance between your two jaw corners divided by the distance across the widest part of your face. This is a standard anthropometric ratio and the single most useful thing a front photo gives you about a jaw, because both endpoints sit on the same plane as the camera.
The second is the taper: your chin width divided by your jaw width, which separates a V-shaped lower face from a square one. The third is asymmetry, the difference between how far each jaw corner sits from your facial midline. The fourth is the jaw angle as it projects onto the front plane — useful, comparable between your own photos, and not the same thing as a gonial angle. The rating combines the angle and the width ratio, weighted toward the angle, because visible corner definition is what people mean when they say a jaw is sharp.
Why a photo cannot give you a true gonial angle
The gonial angle is the angle between the ascending ramus of the mandible — the vertical part that runs up to the joint in front of your ear — and the body of the mandible, the horizontal part that carries your teeth. Both of those live in a plane that runs front to back through your head. A camera pointed at your face records the plane at right angles to that one, so the angle it can see is a projection: the shadow of the real angle cast onto the front of your face.
Projections are not stable. Turn your head five degrees and the projected angle changes, while the real one obviously does not. Raise the camera and it changes again. That is why the number this page reports is labelled a projected jaw angle and reported for each side separately — if the two sides differ by more than a few degrees, your head was turned, and the reading is telling you about your pose rather than your mandible. The real measurement is taken from a lateral cephalogram, a side-on radiograph, and any tool offering you a gonial angle from a selfie is quoting a projection under a borrowed name.
Jaw width against cheekbones: the measurement that does work
Bigonial width divided by bizygomatic width is the number worth reading, and it needs no depth. It describes whether your jaw carries the width of your face down past the cheekbones or falls away beneath them. Values around 0.78 to 0.92 read as a jaw that follows through; below that the lower face narrows sharply, and above it the jaw is as wide as the cheekbones and the corner stops reading as a corner at all.
This is also the number that changes with the procedures people search for. Masseter botox reduces the muscle bulk at the jaw corner and lowers the ratio. Jaw or chin filler raises it, as does a genioplasty at the front. Nothing about the ratio is a verdict — wide, average and narrow jaws are all common and all normal — but it is the measurement a consultation will start from, and having your own number before you walk in is worth more than a rating out of ten.
Does mewing change your gonial angle?
Not measurably in an adult, and this is the honest answer rather than the popular one. Mewing describes holding the tongue against the palate with the lips closed. In growing children, tongue and lip posture genuinely influences how the jaws develop — this is uncontroversial in orthodontics and is the basis of myofunctional therapy. After the growth plates close, the mandible is bone, and posture does not remodel bone shape on the timescale the internet claims.
What can change in an adult is everything sitting on top of the bone. Body fat over the jaw and under the chin changes the visible line substantially. Masseter size responds to clenching and chewing. Fluid retention moves the jawline within a single day. A person who starts mewing and also loses weight, sleeps better and stops clenching will see a different jawline in the mirror, and will reasonably attribute it to the tongue. If you want to test it, measure with this tool from the same distance and the same light on two dates and compare the width ratio, which does not depend on your pose the way the angle does.
How to improve your jawline
The answers divide cleanly into three, and confusing them is why the advice online contradicts itself. Body composition is the largest lever for most people: subcutaneous fat over the jaw and in the submental area sits directly on the line you are trying to see, and it responds to the ordinary things. Muscle is the second: the masseter can be reduced with botox or enlarged by clenching, and which direction you want depends on whether your ratio reads wide or narrow.
Bone is the third and only surgery moves it — genioplasty, jaw reduction at the angle, or orthognathic surgery when the bite is involved. Chewing gum, jaw exercisers and facial massage act on the second category at most, and the marketing for them borrows the language of the third. If your measurement reads narrow, adding definition is a matter of adding structure rather than removing anything, which is the opposite of what most jawline advice assumes.
A defined jawline is not always bone
Two people can produce the same jawline rating on this page for entirely different reasons: one with a low mandibular angle and ordinary soft tissue, one with a wider angle and very little of it. From the front they read the same. From the side they do not, and neither do the procedures that would change them.
This is the honest limit of measuring a jaw from a photograph, and it is why the result card lists the submental angle — the line from under the chin to the neck — as something not measured. That line is what most people are actually looking at when they judge a jawline as sharp, and no front-facing photograph contains it.
Tips for an accurate jawline measurement
- Face the camera square on. Rotation is the single biggest source of error here — check that the left and right angles in your result come out within a couple of degrees of each other.
- Camera at eye level, roughly arm's length. A low camera exaggerates the jaw and a high one erases it, and phone cameras held close distort the lower face more than the upper.
- Chin level and mouth closed, teeth together but not clenched. Clenching bulks the masseter and widens the reading.
- Even light from the front. Side lighting throws a shadow along the jaw that the model may follow instead of the actual contour.
Jawline Rating Test — frequently asked questions
What is a good gonial angle in degrees?
Roughly 110 to 130 degrees in adults, measured on a lateral radiograph, with lower numbers reading as a squarer, more defined jaw. The projected angle this page reports from a front photo runs systematically wider and is not comparable to those figures.
Can I measure my gonial angle at home?
Not the real one. You can measure the projection from a front photo, which is what this tool does, or take a strict side profile and estimate from it — the side estimate is closer to the true angle but still depends on where you place the jaw corner, which is easy to see on a radiograph and hard to see on skin.
Why do my left and right jaw angles differ?
Usually head rotation rather than facial asymmetry. A few degrees of turn shows up as several degrees of difference between the two sides. If the gap stays after a straight-on retake, look at the left-against-right figure instead, which compares each jaw corner against your own midline.
Does chewing gum give you a better jawline?
It enlarges the masseter, which widens the jaw at the corner. Whether that improves your jawline depends on which direction you needed to go — if your jaw already reads wide against your cheekbones, it moves you further from definition, not toward it.
What is bigonial width?
The straight-line distance between the two gonions, the bony corners where the jaw turns upward toward the ear. It is a standard anthropometric measurement, and unlike the gonial angle it reads accurately from a front photograph.
Does the jawline change with age?
Yes, in both layers. The mandibular angle opens as bone remodels, and the soft tissue over the jaw descends. The second is the more visible of the two and the one that most jawline treatments address.
References
- 1.Farkas, L. G. (1994). Anthropometry of the Head and Face (2nd ed.). Raven Press.
- 2.Proffit, W. R., Fields, H. W., Larson, B. E., & Sarver, D. M. (2019). Contemporary Orthodontics (6th ed.). Elsevier.
- 3.Rhodes, G. (2006). The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 199–226.