Side profile analysis

Updated 15 October 2026How we measure

Last updated 15 October 2026

What your side profile result means

The free result gives three numbers from the side view of your face, each next to the value on an average face:

• Gonial angle: the angle at the corner of your jaw, between the back edge that runs up to the ear and the lower edge that runs to the chin. Lower means a squarer, sharper corner; higher a more open, sloping one. The average face reads 125°.
• Chin projection: how far the most forward point of your chin sits in front of (+) or behind (−) a vertical line through the nasion, the dip at the top of the nose between the eyes. It is given as a percentage of the height from the nasion to the bottom of the chin, so it doesn’t depend on how big your face is. The average face reads −0.4%: almost exactly on the line.
• Nose projection: how far the tip of your nose sits in front of the same line, in the same units. The average face reads +18.5%.

Each measure shows which side of your face it came from and a confidence from 0 to 1. Below 0.5 the number isn’t shown at all; the card says “not resolved in this scan” instead, because a guessed number is worse than none. When it is resolved, a figure of your own profile is drawn from your scan.

These numbers describe shape, not quality. A sharper jaw angle and a chin that sits on or slightly in front of the line are the combination that the attractiveness research associates with a defined lower face, especially for men, and our attractiveness test scores the profile accordingly. The free result doesn’t grade you; it tells you where you sit.

How the scan measures a profile without a profile photo

Measuring a profile sounds like it needs a side-on photo. In practice the face models that run in a browser are trained mostly on faces looking roughly towards the camera, and on a true side-on photo they place the far side of the face, and often the jaw, from guesswork. A tool that measured your profile from one side-on photo would give you confident numbers that move a lot from photo to photo.

So the scan does something different. It asks you to look straight at the camera, then turn your head about 25° to the left and 25° to the right, and holds each position for 8 frames. Google’s MediaPipe Face Landmarker places 478 points on every frame, each with an estimated depth. For each turn, the frames are fused into one steady mesh and rotated back to face-on in 3D, and the side view is read from it: the midline from forehead to chin, and the jaw on the side that faced the camera (turning to your right shows the camera your left jaw).

The turn matters because a head turned 25° shows the camera the depth of the face as sideways movement: the nose tip swings further than the cheeks, the jaw corner comes into view. The model sees the nose and jaw partly from the side, which sharpens its depth estimate compared with a straight-on photo. Then three checks decide how much to trust each number:

1. How far you actually turned. Below about 10° there is too little side view; beyond about 45° the mesh starts to degrade. Between 20° and 40° is ideal.
2. How steady the measure was across the 8 frames. A jaw angle that jumps by several degrees from frame to frame isn’t reported.
3. Whether the turned view agrees with the front view. The turned mesh, rotated back, should match the front mesh. If it doesn’t, the model lost track.

When both turns give a measure, the two are combined, weighted by confidence, and the confidence drops if they disagree. The methodology page has the details, and the jawline and gonial angle guide explains the anatomy.

What a 25° turn can and can’t resolve

We would rather be precise about the limits than oversell the numbers:

• Depth is estimated, not seen. At 25° only about 42% of a depth difference shows up as sideways movement in the image (a true profile shows all of it). The rest comes from the face model’s 3D estimate, which is learned and smooth. Nose and chin projection are therefore good at ranking (more or less than average) and less exact in absolute terms.
• The jaw angle is a surface angle. The scan sees skin, not bone. Muscle and fat round the corner, so the angle reads a few degrees wider than the bony angle on an X-ray, and a full beard hides it.
• The nose-to-lip angle is coarse. The mesh has a single point on the underside of the nose, so the nasolabial angle is an estimate to compare with the average face, not with clinical norms. That is why it sits in the full report rather than the free result.
• Natural head position is unknown. The vertical line is the face model’s vertical, not the way you naturally carry your head, which we can’t observe from a short scan.

The jaw angle in more detail

The gonial angle is where the jaw’s two parts meet: the ramus, the near-vertical branch that runs up in front of the ear to the joint, and the body, the horizontal part that carries the lower teeth and ends at the chin. On adult jaws the angle is usually somewhere in the 120s of degrees. It is much wider at birth and closes as the jaw grows, and women’s angles average a few degrees wider than men’s: in a study of medieval and 20th-century skeletons, Faus-Valero and colleagues found the female angle about 3.5–4° wider on each side.

On a face, a lower angle (a squarer corner) together with a jaw that is wide relative to the cheekbones gives the “defined jaw” look; a higher angle gives a longer, sloping line from ear to chin. Both are common. How defined your jawline looks also depends on things that are not the angle: the fat under the jaw and chin, the size of the chewing muscle at the corner (the masseter), the skin, your posture, and a beard. That is also why a jaw looks different at 20 kg lighter or with the head held forward.

Chin and nose projection in more detail

Chin projection is the part of a profile people tend to notice first, and it changes how the whole lower face reads. Naini and colleagues showed people profile images with the chin moved forward and back in steps and found that its prominence changed how attractive the profile was judged, for patients, clinicians and laypeople alike. A chin that sits well behind the line makes the nose and lips look more prominent; one well in front makes the lower face look longer and stronger.

Nose projection and chin projection are read together: a larger nose reads larger next to a recessed chin and smaller next to a projecting one. That is why the two are measured against the same vertical line and in the same units. The average face’s nose tip sits +18.5% of face height in front of the line. How widely real noses spread around that, measured this way, has not been published, so the result compares you with the average face rather than with a population range.

Straight, convex and concave profiles

When people talk about a “profile view”, they often mean its overall shape, which dentists and surgeons describe with three words. Picture a line from the forehead between the brows down to the base of the nose, and a second line from there down to the chin. In a straight profile the two lines run nearly in line. In a convex profile the chin sits further back, so the face bends outward at the base of the nose, like the outside of a curve. In a concave profile the chin sits further forward, so the face bends inward.

Most adults have a slightly convex profile: the chin sits a little behind the forehead. A clearly convex profile usually goes with a smaller or set-back lower jaw, a clearly concave one with a forward-set lower jaw or a flatter midface. These are descriptions, not diagnoses; whether a bite needs attention is a question for a dentist or orthodontist, and this page is not medical advice.

The scan doesn’t sort you into one of the three, because the forehead point it would need is not measured reliably from a 25° turn. Your chin projection tells you most of the same thing: a clearly negative value goes with a more convex profile, a value near zero with a straight one, and a clearly positive value with a straighter or concave profile. Read it together with your nose projection, since a prominent nose makes any profile look more convex.

Why your profile looks different in photos and mirrors

You rarely see your own profile directly. In a mirror you see it from the front, and in photos it is shaped by the lens. A phone held at arm’s length or closer exaggerates whatever is nearest to it: Ward and colleagues modelled faces at selfie distance and found that at about 30 cm the nose looks around 30% larger than in a photo taken from 1.5 m, where the effect disappears. In a three-quarter selfie the nose is the nearest feature, so it grows and the jaw shrinks.

Head position does the rest. Tipping your chin down folds the skin under the jaw and softens the angle; tipping it up and pushing it slightly forward stretches the line under the chin. Neither changes the measurement here, because the scan rotates your head back to straight before measuring. That makes the numbers more repeatable than any photo, but it also means they describe your face, not the angle you prefer to be photographed from.

To see your profile the way others see it, take a photo from about 1.5–2 m away with a zoom lens (most phones have a 2× or 3× setting), camera at the height of your nose, head level. The true mirror shows your face un-flipped from the front.

Getting a reliable scan

• Turn your whole head, not your eyes. The scan captures each side when your head is turned about 25°; keep looking roughly where your nose points.
• Keep your chin level. Don’t tip your head up or down while turning; the tilt steps of the scan come separately.
• Tie long hair back so the jaw corner and the ear are visible on both sides.
• Use light from the front. Strong side light puts one jaw in shadow, and that side’s measures lose confidence.
• Relax your mouth and jaw. Clenching changes the jaw corner; a smile moves the lips and the chin.

If a measure comes back “not resolved in this scan”, scan again and turn a little further, holding still for a moment at each side.

What the full report adds

The free result gives your jaw angle and your chin and nose projection. The Full Face Report costs $14.99, paid once, and adds the nose-to-lip angle, cheekbone prominence and your profile score out of 100, as one of the six components of your attractiveness score, with the confidence of every measure and which turn it came from. It also covers your face shape, symmetry, proportions and eyes, and what would move your score. It is built on your device from the same scan.

Keep reading

• Jawline and gonial angle
• Mewing before and after: what the evidence shows
• Facial thirds and fifths

Other tools that use the same scan:

• Attractiveness test: an attractiveness score from 1.0 to 10.0, with its tier.
• Face shape detector: your face shape out of six, with how confident the match is.
• Facial ratios calculator: your vertical thirds, horizontal fifths and the key width ratios.