Do you have a square jaw?

Almost every article on this subject asks you to compare your face to a photograph of someone else's. That does not work, because a jaw only reads as square relative to the face around it. A wide jaw under wider cheekbones reads tapered. The same jaw under narrower cheekbones reads square. The absolute width tells you nothing on its own.

So the useful measurement is a proportion: jaw width divided by cheekbone width. It removes head size from the question entirely, which is why the same figure works whether you have a large head or a small one.

1. 1Pull your hair back and stand square to a mirror, with your eyes level. Tilting the head changes apparent jaw width more than most people expect.
2. 2Measure straight across the face at the jaw angles, the corners below and slightly forward of your ears. Not around the jaw, across it.
3. 3Measure straight across the cheekbones at their widest point.
4. 4Divide the jaw measurement by the cheekbone measurement. A number near 0.97 or above is a square jaw; near 0.82 is a tapered one.

This is the part most people are actually asking about without realising it. A square face needs two things at once: a jaw close in width to the cheekbones, and a face that is not much longer than it is wide. The square profile sits at 1.10 for length against cheekbone width, which is close to square in the literal sense.

You can have a square jaw on a face that is not square. A triangle face has the widest jaw of all seven profiles at 1.02, wider than square, but it runs longer at 1.16 and narrows at the brow, so the overall outline is not square. An oblong face can carry a fairly strong jaw at 0.84 and still read long rather than square, because length dominates.

Being a few hundredths away from a figure in that table means nothing. The gap between round at 0.88 and oblong at 0.84 is smaller than the error introduced by measuring at slightly the wrong height on the jaw. Being a long way from one of them is what matters.

It also says nothing about whether a square jaw is desirable, because that is not a question with an answer. It is a proportion, the same way height is a proportion. This site measures it so that styling choices can be made from something real rather than from guesswork, and for no other purpose.

Nothing here is medical, and this site does not cover exercises, jaw training or surgery. Those are health questions and they belong with a qualified professional, not a styling tool.