What your result means
The hairstyle finder answers one question: what haircut suits my face? It does that in two steps. First it measures your face shape from the scan, the same way the face shape detector does. Then it looks up the cuts that suit that shape and lists them for you. The result has five parts.
- Your face shape and its confidence. One of six shapes: oval, round, square, oblong, heart or diamond. The confidence says how clearly your proportions sit inside that shape.
- The brief. One sentence on what the cut should do for your face, such as “add height on top and keep the sides close at cheek level”. This is the line to read out at the salon or the barber.
- Cuts by length. Short hair, medium length and long hair, each with three or four cuts that follow the brief. Every list holds cuts usually worn by men and cuts usually worn by women, because the finder doesn’t ask and the advice doesn’t change with it.
- Go easy on. The cuts that work against your shape, usually because they add width where your face is already widest or length where it is already long.
- Beard. If you wear one, the beard shape that follows the same logic on the lower face.
When the confidence is below 65%, your face sits between two shapes. The finder then names the second shape and adds its brief. That is not a failed scan: face shapes are categories with fuzzy borders, and many faces sit near one. In practice the advice for neighbouring shapes overlaps, so you can take what the two have in common.
- face shapes it chooses between
- 6
- proportions it measures
- 4
- hair lengths it covers
- 3
- the range of the confidence
- 50-95%
Why a haircut changes your face shape
Nobody sees the outline of your face on its own. They see your face and your hair together, and the hair changes that silhouette more than any feature of the face can. Height at the crown makes the silhouette longer. Volume at the sides makes it wider. A fringe covers part of the forehead and makes it shorter. The figure below shows one round face with three cuts: the face never changes, but the shape people read does.
Close crop
Close all round
1.06 : 1
Width at the sides
Chin-length volume
0.81 : 1
Height on top
Close sides, long
1.42 : 1
That is the whole idea behind hairstyle advice for face shapes. A cut can lengthen a short face, widen a narrow one and move attention away from the widest line. Research backs the premise that hair matters: in experiments by Saegusa, Intoy and Shimojo, the hair around a face shifted how attractive people rated the face, even when they were told to judge the face alone.
How the hairstyle finder works
The scan places 478 landmarks on your face with Google’s MediaPipe Face Landmarker, running in your browser. It captures the front view as a short burst of frames while your head is straight, combines them, and turns the mesh back to face the camera so a small turn doesn’t narrow one side. From the mesh it takes four measurements:
- Length to width: the face from the top of the mesh to the chin, divided by the width across the cheekbones.
- Forehead to cheekbones: the width across the temples as a share of the cheekbone width.
- Jaw to cheekbones: the width across the jaw corners as a share of the cheekbone width.
- Jaw angle: how sharply the jawline turns at its corners.
Each shape has a prototype, the four values a face of that shape typically has. The finder measures how far your values are from each prototype and picks the nearest. The gap to the second nearest becomes the confidence. The prototypes and a worked example are on the face shape detector page, and the methodology explains the landmarks in detail.
The step from shape to haircut is a lookup, not a guess by a model. Each shape has one set of advice, the same advice the hairstyles guide prints in full. Hair design textbooks teach the same idea: judge the face shape, then use the cut to balance it. Research on hairstyle recommender systems, such as the work by Pasupa and colleagues, follows the same two steps of classifying the face shape and then suggesting styles for it.
Getting a clean reading
- Hair back. A fringe hides the top of the forehead and makes the face read shorter; hair over the cheeks makes it read narrower.
- Distance. Hold the phone at arm’s length or further. Close up, the lens makes a face look narrower and longer.
- Neutral face. A smile widens the lower face and can push the result toward round.
- Even light. A shadow along the jaw hides its edge.
- Beard. The jaw landmarks follow the outline the camera sees, so a full beard widens the jaw. If your result seems wrong, the clean-shaven shape is the one under the beard.
What hairstyle suits my face shape?
Here is the brief for each of the six shapes the finder can return, with what to go easy on. Your own result lists the cuts by length. For the full advice on every shape, with fringes, partings and beards, read the hairstyles for your face shape guide.
| Shape | What the cut should do | Go easy on |
|---|---|---|
| Oval | Keep the balance you have, and choose on hair type and taste, since almost any cut works. | A heavy fringe that hides most of the forehead, and very tall styles. |
| Round | Add height on top and keep the sides close at cheek level. | Chin-length rounded bobs, blunt fringes and fullness at the cheeks. |
| Square | Soften the corners with texture and layers, or keep it short and let the jaw lead. | Blunt cuts that end exactly at the jaw and flat, severe centre partings. |
| Oblong | Add width at the sides and hold back length, with a fringe to shorten the forehead. | Tall quiffs and very long, straight, flat hair, both of which add length. |
| Heart | Add volume from the cheekbones to the jaw and soften a wide forehead. | Big volume at the crown and temples with tight sides at the jaw. |
| Diamond | Fill out the forehead and jaw, so the cheekbones don’t carry all the width. | Slicked-back styles with tight sides, and volume at cheek level. |
Two patterns run through the table. Shapes that are short for their width, round and square, want height. Shapes that are long or narrow somewhere, oblong, heart and diamond, want width where they are narrow. Oval sits in the middle, which is why it is called the easy shape: there is nothing to correct, so the choice comes down to hair type and taste.
Triangle: the seventh shape
Many face shape charts add a triangle or pear shape, where the jaw is the widest part of the face. The detector has no triangle prototype, so a face like that comes out as square or round, usually with a lower confidence. If your jaw is clearly your widest line, follow the triangle advice in the guide instead. It is the opposite of heart: width and volume at the top, close at the jaw, and ends that fall below the jaw rather than at it.
What haircut suits my face if I have short hair?
Short cuts have fewer levers, so the parting and the top do most of the work. Height on top lengthens a round or square face. A fringe brought forward shortens an oblong one. Sides left a little longer add width to a heart or diamond face at the jaw or temples. Very short sides with a tall top suit round faces and work against oblong ones. The short hair list in your result follows these rules for your shape.
And with long hair?
Long hair has more levers and more ways to go wrong. The length decides where a horizontal line falls: ends at the chin add width there, ends past the chin lengthen the face. Layers decide where the volume sits. Waves and curls add width on their own, which helps long and narrow faces and needs shaping at the sides on round ones. The long hair list in your result names the layers and partings that suit your shape.
Beyond face shape: what else decides the cut
Face shape is a good place to start, and a poor place to stop. Several other things decide whether a cut will work for you, and a good hairdresser weighs all of them.
- Hair type. Fine, straight hair holds height poorly, so a round face with fine hair often does better with length and a side parting than with a tall top. Thick or curly hair builds width by itself, which suits oblong, heart and diamond faces.
- Hairline. A high or receding hairline lengthens the upper face. That points toward shorter, textured cuts with some fringe rather than more height on top.
- Your proportions inside the outline. A long upper third is a good argument for a fringe, whatever your shape. The facial ratios calculator measures your thirds and widths on your own face.
- Glasses. Frames add a strong horizontal line across the face. If you wear them every day, the glasses guide applies the same logic to frames, and the two choices work best together.
- Time. A cut that needs a blow-dry every morning only suits your face if you will actually style it. Tell your hairdresser how long you spend.
- Change over time. As weight and age change the soft tissue of the face, it can drift from oval toward round or oblong. Scan again every few years and adjust the brief.
How to brief your hairdresser
Hairdressers learn face shapes in training, but they draw the borders differently, so a shape name on its own can start a debate. Give them the brief instead:
- Your face shape, and the second shape if the finder called it a close call.
- What the cut should add: height, width at the jaw, width at the temples, a fringe.
- What to avoid, from the go easy on line.
- Your hair type, your hairline and how much styling time you will spend.
- One or two cuts from your list that you would actually wear.
Before a new parting or fringe, look at your face in the true mirror. A normal mirror shows you flipped, and a parting can look very different the right way round. If you want to see where your face sits between the shapes, the face shapes chart draws all seven side by side, and how to find your face shape walks through measuring it by hand.
What the full analysis adds
The hairstyle finder answers the hair question from your outline. The full face analysis scans your face from five angles and reads what sits inside the outline: your eyes and brows, nose, lips, jaw and chin, each against a cited band, plus your profile from the side. Its free result is your attractiveness score with its six components.
The Full Face Report ($14.99, paid once) then adds the frames that suit your face shape, your colour season from your own skin, eyes and hair, and a ranked plan of what to change first. It is built from your own scan, and it is optional: everything on this page stays free.
Related guides and tools
Sources
- Milady Standard Cosmetology, 14th ed. (chapter: Principles of Hair Design)
- Saegusa C, Intoy J, Shimojo S. Visual attractiveness is leaky: the asymmetrical relationship between face and hair
- Pasupa K, Sunhem W, Loo CK. A hybrid approach to building face shape classifier for hairstyle recommender system
- Farkas, L. G. (ed.). Anthropometry of the Head and Face, 2nd edition
- Google. Model card: MediaPipe Face Mesh V2