How the finder decides
The finder puts six observation questions to you, each about a proportion an optician would check: the length of the face against its width, where the face is widest, the line of the jaw, how the forehead compares with the jaw. Every question comes with drawn diagrams to compare against, and each silhouette is generated from measured parameters, then decoded back against the convention before it shipped.
No single observation settles a shape. Answers are scored per shape across the standard six-shape system: oval, round, square, heart, diamond and oblong.
Measuring by hand
A soft tape measure turns impressions into numbers. Four figures do most of the work:
- Length: from the middle of the hairline straight down to the tip of the chin.
- Width: across the widest part of the face, conventionally cheekbone to cheekbone, just below the outer corners of the eyes.
- Forehead: across its widest part, hairline to hairline, roughly midway between the eyebrows and the hairline.
- Jaw: from the tip of the chin to the corner of the jaw below the ear, then doubled for the full jawline.
The commonly quoted convention is that a face reads as longer when its length is about one and a half times its width or more, while a length close to the width reads as similar.
What you get
The result screen shows the full point spread, not just a winner. When two shapes finish close together, the finder calls it a boundary between the two, because plenty of real faces sit exactly there, and a tidy single label would be less honest than the scores themselves.