Face shape · one of 7

Heart

Heart is a face that gets narrower on the way down: the forehead is the widest measurement, the jaw is clearly the narrowest, and the chin finishes in a point. Also published as Inverted Triangle, which is the more literal name and the reason people end up on the wrong page.

How to measure Take the free test

Also called Inverted Triangle. Same shape, different name — this page covers both.

How to check whether this is you

Four numbers, straight on, hair pushed all the way back off the hairline, camera at eye level. Forehead at its widest, temple to temple, about halfway between the brow and the hairline. Cheekbones at the widest point of the face, level with the outer corner of the eye. Jaw at the angle, between the corners you can feel below and just forward of each earlobe. Length, hairline to the bottom of the chin. Heart is decided by the top-to-bottom comparison rather than by length: divide the forehead width by the jaw width, and on this shape the answer is about 1.15 or more — the forehead beats the jaw by fifteen percent or better. The cheekbones may be the single widest number, but only barely, and forehead and cheekbones sit close together while the jaw drops away from both. Length over cheekbone width lands in the middle of the range, roughly 1.30 to 1.42. The chin is narrow and comes to a point rather than a flat edge. The mis-measurements here are both about the top of the face. First, the hairline: a high or receding hairline inflates both the forehead width and the length, and if your hairline has moved you should measure from where hair currently starts and say so, because you are measuring a hairline rather than a skull. Second, the name. This shape is also called Inverted Triangle; the shape called Triangle on this site is its opposite, with the jaw as the wide end. If your jaw is the widest measurement rather than the narrowest, close this page and open Triangle.

Where it sits on the four axes

Face shape here is four measurements, not a vibe: proportion, jawline, top-to-bottom balance, and where the face is widest. Those are the four scores the questionnaire produces, so a verdict can always be traced back to the measurement that drove it.

ProportionSlightly: longer than wide · +1wider than longlonger than wide
JawlineClearly: curved · -2curvedangular
Top-to-bottom balanceStrongly: forehead wider · -3forehead widerjaw wider
CheekbonesSlightly: widest point · +1flatwidest point

Why someone gets read as Heart

Grouped by the axis each observation moves.

Proportion

Slightly: longer than wide · +1

Length over cheekbone width sits in the middle of the range, about 1.30 to 1.42 — slightly longer than wide, but length is not what defines this shape.
In a straight-on photo the face reads as neither short nor elongated. What draws the eye is the width at the top, not the height.

Jawline

Clearly: curved · -2

Tracing from the chin back toward the ear finds a soft, gentle curve rather than a corner. The jaw is narrow enough that there is not much bone there to turn one.
The chin is narrow and pointed. The lower face converges to a single point rather than closing off on a flat edge, and photographs tend to catch a shadow under it.

Top-to-bottom balance

Strongly: forehead wider · -3

Forehead width divided by jaw width comes out at about 1.15 or more. Held side by side the two measurements are obviously different rather than a close call.
The face tapers inward toward the chin, and sharply. Drawn as an outline it is a wedge with the wide end at the temples.

Cheekbones

Slightly: widest point · +1

The cheekbones are the widest single measurement or close to it, but they barely beat the forehead. The width at the top of the face is shared between brow and cheek rather than owned by one of them.
Cheekbones read as clearly visible in a straight-on photo, helped by the narrow jaw underneath giving them something to stand out against.

What suits it

Haircuts and partings: Add width low and take it away at the temples. Length at or below the chin, with the volume living from the jaw downward, gives the narrow lower face something to fill it out: a chin-length bob with a slight forward angle, a textured lob, layers that start at the jaw rather than at the cheekbone, and soft waves through the ends all do this. The most useful single change is a fringe. A curtain fringe parting at the center, or a side-swept fringe, covers part of the forehead width and softens the point of the hairline; if you have a widow's peak, a fringe is also the fastest way to stop it drawing a downward arrow at the top of your face. A deep side part helps for the same reason. What works against this shape is anything that maximizes the top: hair scraped back into a tight center-parted bun with nothing at the forehead, big volume at the crown and temples, and a very short pixie with all the height on top and nothing at the sides. Avoid heavy layers that stop at the cheekbone, since they add width exactly where the face has plenty.
Glasses and sunglasses: Weight at the bottom of the frame, lightness at the top. Rimless and semi-rimless frames with the rim only along the lower edge, aviators, ovals, round shapes, and frames with a thin or pale upper rim over a darker lower one all shift the visual mass downward toward the narrow part of the face. Frame width should be no wider than your forehead — this is the one shape where a frame wider than the face is a mistake, because it extends the widest line you have. Keep the temple arms attached low, at or below the midpoint of the lens. What to avoid: heavy decorated top rims, embellished or contrast-colored temple arms sitting high, and a strong upswept cat-eye, all of which pile width and detail onto the temples. Butterfly and oversized frames tend to do the same thing.
Necklines and collars: Width at the shoulders and the collarbone, to answer the width at the brow. A boat neck, a wide scoop, an off-shoulder top, a cowl, a spread shirt collar worn open, and a square neckline all put a horizontal low on the frame and balance the wedge. Halters and deep narrow V-necks are the ones to reconsider, because they repeat the inward taper the face already has, as does a plunging surplice. For necklaces, short is better than long: a 14 to 16 inch choker or a 16 to 18 inch collar sits at the widest part of the neckline and reinforces it, where a long pendant on a 28 inch chain draws a second point below the chin and doubles the effect you are trying to soften.
Earrings: Wider at the bottom than at the top. Teardrops, pear shapes, chandeliers that fan outward, triangle shapes pointing down, and any drop that gains width as it falls all add mass at jaw level where the face is narrowest. Length to the jawline or an inch past it is the useful zone; much longer and the earring finishes below the chin and lengthens the same wedge. What to skip is the top-heavy shape — a wide flat statement stud filling the earlobe, or a cluster that sits high and wide near the temple — and a narrow linear drop, which repeats the vertical taper. Medium to large hoops work well, since the widest part of the circle falls at the jaw.
Brow shape: Keep the arch low and soft. A high, sharply arched brow adds apparent height to a forehead that is already the widest and most noticeable part of the face, so a rounded or gently angled arch with the peak set no further out than the outer edge of the iris is the better shape here. Do not let the tails run long and low toward the temple, which stretches the widest line wider; keep them ending at the point where a line from the outer nostril past the outer corner of the eye would cross. A brow of moderate thickness suits this face better than a very bold one, since a heavy brow adds another horizontal band across the top of a wedge.
Contour, blush and highlight: Take width off the top and put light at the bottom. Lay a matte shade one to two tones deeper than your skin along the outer edges of the forehead where it meets the hairline at the temples, and blend upward and outward; a light touch in the hollow under the cheekbone is optional and should stop well short of the mouth. Then do the opposite at the chin: highlight the center of the chin and along the front of the jaw, which pushes the narrowest part of the face forward and makes it read wider. Blush goes on the apple of the cheek and sweeps slightly forward and down toward the mouth rather than up to the temple, since an upward sweep sends the eye to the part of the face that already has the width. For lips, keeping the lower lip full and the shape slightly wider than your natural line adds weight at the bottom of the face.

Easy to confuse with

Heart vs Diamond

Both are widest across the top half and both finish in a narrow chin, so the difference is the forehead. On a Heart the forehead is wide — within a few percent of the cheekbones, and clearly wider than the jaw. On a Diamond the forehead is narrow, and the cheekbones beat both it and the jaw by ten percent or more. Measure your temples: if they are nearly as wide as your cheekbones, this is the right page.

Read the Diamond page →

Heart vs Oval

Both taper toward the chin; the question is how hard. An Oval narrows gently and finishes rounded, with the forehead and jaw within about a tenth of each other. A Heart narrows sharply and finishes in a point, with the forehead beating the jaw by fifteen percent or more. These two sit closest together of any pair in our engine, and a single answer about chin shape can move a profile from one to the other, so measure rather than judging by eye.

Read the Oval page →

Heart vs Round

Round shares the soft jaw and the absence of a corner, but not the balance or the ratio. On a Round face the forehead and jaw are within about a tenth of each other and the chin is rounded; on a Heart the forehead is clearly the wider end and the chin is a point. Round also measures about 1.20 or below on length over cheekbone width, where Heart sits nearer 1.30 to 1.42.

Read the Round page →

Heart vs Oblong

An Oblong is the wedge straightened out: same soft jaw, but the three widths agree within a few percent instead of narrowing downward, and the length runs about 1.45 and up. If your jaw measures close to your forehead rather than fifteen percent under it, length is what is defining your face and Oblong is the page to read.

Read the Oblong page →

Heart is one of four readings

Face shape decides frames and haircuts. The dossier reads it against your color season, your body line and your skin undertone — which is what decides an outfit — and shows the evidence table behind all four.

Get the dossier — $19One time · 14-day refund

Sources

— 5 claims, each with where it comes from

Every claim on this page that is not our own measurement is listed here with where it comes from. Anything we could not source, we left out.

Heart and Inverted Triangle are the same category under two naming conventions, and the cosmetology curriculum that most stylists trained on uses seven categories.Milady Standard Cosmetology, 14th Edition, 13th-14th Edition Transition Guide (Milady, a part of Cengage Learning, copyright 2023; document 79011_TransitionGuide_rev01, dated 24 March 2022), read in full on 2026-08-31. Chapter 9, Principles of Hair Design, learning objective 7 reads "Identify the seven different facial shapes and design a beneficial hairstyle for each", and the guide lists a new "Table 9-4, Determining Face Shapes". The guide does not enumerate the seven names, so the specific pairing of "Heart" with "Inverted Triangle" is reported here as the common convention rather than as Milady's wording.
Naming is genuinely unsettled in this field, which is why this page carries both names instead of splitting into two.Read on 2026-08-31. Optometrists.org, published by Optometrists Network, names five shapes in its frame guide — square, round, heart, triangular and oval — using "heart" and "triangular" as two different categories, and gives a heart face "winged-out frames" such as an "aviator or D-frame". The labelled dataset at github.com/dsmlr/faceshape, published with Pasupa K, Sunhem W, Loo CK, "A Hybrid Approach to Building Face Shape Classifier for Hairstyle Recommender System", Expert Systems With Applications, doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2018.11.011, separates its images into five directories and has no triangle class at all.
The mid-range length ratio quoted on this page, about 1.30 to 1.42, is converted from published anthropometric bands rather than taken from styling convention.Shrestha R, Shrestha N, Upadhyay HP, "Prevalence of Leptoprosopic Type of Face among Dental Students: A Cross-Sectional study", JNMA Journal of the Nepal Medical Association 2019; 57(218):216-220, doi:10.31729/jnma.4416. Read in full on 2026-08-31. It defines the facial index as nasion-to-gnathion height over bizygomatic width, times 100, with mesoprosopic at 85 to 89.5 and leptoprosopic at 90 to 94.5. The anthropometric height starts at the nasion, at the bridge of the nose, not the hairline; converting those bands to the hairline-to-chin measurement on this page is our own arithmetic, multiplying by 1.5 on the classical three-part division of the face. The bands are theirs, the conversion is ours, and other published tables set the boundaries a point or two differently.
The forehead-to-jaw threshold used here has no published band behind it and is this site's own operating rule.The classical facial index uses only facial height and bizygomatic width; it does not use forehead width or jaw width, so there is no anthropometric band to convert for the forehead-over-jaw comparison. The figure of about 1.15 is our own cut point, chosen so that it sits outside the measurement error a person gets holding a tape against their own face, and it is stated here so it can be argued with rather than presented as a fact. Verified against this site's own engine on 2026-08-31: running all 390,625 possible answer sets through the face shape questionnaire, every one of the seven shapes is reachable, with Heart returned for 9.5 percent of them.
Facial proportion norms are not the same across populations, so any single threshold table including this one is an approximation.Farkas LG, Katic MJ, Forrest CR, "International anthropometric study of facial morphology in various ethnic groups/races", Journal of Craniofacial Surgery 2005;16(4):615-646, doi:10.1097/01.scs.0000171847.58031.9e, PMID 16077306. Abstract read in full on 2026-08-31 via the PubMed record. The study measured 1,470 healthy subjects aged 18 to 30 drawn from European, Middle Eastern, Asian and African-origin groups and compared each against North American white norms, reporting that horizontal measurements varied between groups more often than vertical ones.