High cheekbones: how to tell if yours are high, low or flat

On a front photo, our ideal range for high cheekbones puts the widest part of your face close to the level of your lower eyelids: 83 to 100% of the way up from your upper lip to your pupils for men, and from 84% for women. None of the three men we measured for this page gets there. They read 64.1%, 67.3% and 71.4%. All three still score Good overall.

Height is only half of what people mean, though. The man with the highest cheekbones of our three, at 71.4%, got the lowest Cheekbone Prominence rating: 6 out of 10, against 7 for the other two. Three faces prove nothing, but they show the split. In our view, when people praise someone’s cheekbones, they are usually looking at the shadow under the bone, not at where it sits.

Here are the three lines on the man from our sample report.

In our scoring, height barely counts: it is 1 of 33 front measurements and never makes your list of strengths or focus areas. How your cheekbones look is another matter. Two ratings for it make up a third of the Angularity pillar, more than the jaw gets. That part depends a lot on the cheek under the bone. Some of it you can change. Three checks tell height and definition apart: your fingers, three lines on a photo, and the shadow.

How to tell if you have high cheekbones

Feel for the bone, then find where your face is widest on a straight front photo. Widest just under your eyes means high. Widest down by your nostrils means low. All three faces on this page sit in between.

Your cheekbones are the two zygomatic bones, one under each eye, forming the lower outer rim of the eye socket. “The cheekbone” can mean two different spots. Your finger finds the front of the bone, below the outer corner of the eye, where highlighter goes. Our engine measures the sides of the face, where the skin outline is widest.

The finger test

Put a fingertip just in front of each ear and slide it forward along the bony ridge toward your nose until it becomes the cheekbone. Notice where it stands out most. On most people that peak sits roughly halfway down from the outer corner of the eye to the level of the nostrils. Clearly closer to the eye corner means yours sit high; closer to the nostrils, lower. The finger tells you where the bone is. It can’t give you a number.

The three-line photo test

This one matches our engine step for step, so you can set your result next to ours.

1. Have a friend take a front photo, or prop the phone at eye level and use the timer, from about 1.5 m (5 feet) away and zoomed in. Keep your chin level and your face neutral, with lips closed, hair off your cheeks and soft light from the front.
2. Draw a level line through the centers of both pupils. Your phone’s photo markup tool works, or print the photo.
3. Draw a level line through the top of your upper lip at the center, the dip of the Cupid’s bow.
4. Find the level where your face is widest between your eyes and the bottom of your nose, at the skin edge. Ignore ears and hair. Draw a level line there. If the outline looks equally wide over a band, take the middle of the band.
5. Measure from the lip line up to the cheek line (B) and from the lip line up to the pupil line (A). Cheekbone height is B divided by A, times 100. Any unit works because it’s a ratio: zoom the photo to fill the screen and hold a ruler to it, or use millimeters on the printout.

On the face in the first figure, B is 204 pixels and A is 303, so 204 divided by 303 gives 67.3%, against 83% where the ideal range for men starts (84% for women). At 100% the cheek line sits on the pupil line. If yours lands in the 60s or low 70s, you’re where all three faces on this page sit. Each of them still rates Good.

Our engine runs the same steps with its own points. It checks 12 level rows between the pupils and the nose and keeps the widest one (how the points are placed). Because it only searches from the pupils down, it never reads above 100%. If you get more, your cheek line is above your pupils. Redraw it between your eyes and the bottom of your nose.

Don’t trust this number to the last point. Our engine flags cheekbone height as low confidence on all three faces here. It is the least certain ratio we take from the front, because the widest part of a cheek is a long, gentle curve and the chosen row can slide by several points. Tipping your chin up lowers it too. Compare only photos taken the same way.

The shadow test for defined or flat cheekbones

Stand at a mirror with light coming from slightly above you. A soft shadow running from under the cheekbone toward the corner of your mouth is what people read as defined. Switch to flat front light, such as a phone flash, and it fades.

Keep the top light and turn your head a little to one side to check for flat. A prominent cheekbone catches a highlight along its top, with the shadow below it. A flat one lights evenly from under the eye to the jaw, with little of either. In profile, the front of the cheek runs in a nearly straight line from the lower eyelid toward the corner of the mouth. Flat means the bone projects little, which is a different thing from low. A fuller cheek gives the same even look, so the mirror can’t always tell a flat bone from a well-padded one.

Both are rules of thumb. Your report judges these from your photos as two ratings: Cheek Leanness & Ogee Curve for the shadow, and Cheekbone Prominence for how far the bone stands out. The ogee is the S-shaped curve from the cheekbone into the cheek below.

Why your cheekbones look different in photos

Cheekbones show up as light and outline, which is exactly what a camera bends. Check any photo of yours for these five before you trust it.

What changes	What it does	Fix
Chin tipped up	Drops the widest part of the cheeks against the eyes and lowers your number	Lens at eye level, chin level
Close selfie, about 30 cm	Makes the nose about 30% wider against the cheekbones than at 1.5 m, in a geometric model1	Stand 1.5 m away and zoom in
Light from straight above vs flash	Top light deepens the shadow under the bone; flat front light hides it	Even front light for the number, the same light every time for the shadow
Smiling	Lifts the cheeks, moving the widest point and the shadow	Neutral face, lips closed
Contour makeup or a filter	Adds shadow that isn’t bone	Bare face, no filter

When celebrities are praised for their high cheekbones, look at the light first. Studio and red-carpet photos often use top light and contour. Both deepen the shadow under the bone. Professional makeup also shifts ratings more than the self-applied kind.² The full checklist for a fair photo is in our attractiveness test guide.

What high vs low cheekbones look like, and where three faces land

Low cheekbones peak closer to the upper lip, so the fullest part of the cheek sits lower and the face is widest nearer the mouth. On the photo test, anything under 50% is low by any reading. High ones sit close to the lower eyelids, with the cheek sloping in below them. Our three faces fall between the two. Here is what each reading scores:

Your number (men’s ranges; women’s are 1 point higher)	Where it sits	Score out of 10
83 to 100%	High: inside our ideal range	10
73 to 82%	Just under high: up to 10 points under the range	About 5 to 10
71.4%	In between (right-hand face)	4.2
67.3%	In between (middle face, the sample)	2.5
64.1%	In between (left-hand face)	1.6
50 to 63%	In between, lower than our three faces	Under 1.5
Under 50%	Low: nearer your lip than your eyes	Close to 0

On these faces the widest part of the cheeks sits about 2 cm below pupil level. Reaching 83% would take it about 8 to 11 mm higher (both estimated). That’s a high bar.

How high your cheekbones sit doesn’t vary much between people. Of 67 patients photographed at an ear, nose and throat practice in a 2015 study, 86% had the most prominent point of the cheek within 3 mm of the average, on a typical-sized face.³ That study used a different point and an angled photo, so its 3 mm and our 8 to 11 mm don’t line up. But if most faces sit that close together, a range starting at 83% asks for something uncommon. Landing under it is no mark against your face.

High vs prominent vs wide cheekbones

Online, high, prominent, defined and big cheekbones all get praised as if they were one thing. Your report scores them separately, because they come apart:

Word	What it describes	How your report reads it
High or low	Where the widest part of the face sits between the eyes and the lip	Cheekbone height, a front-photo ratio
Prominent or defined	How far the bone stands out, forward and to the sides: a highlight on top, a shadow below	Cheekbone Prominence, a 0 to 10 rating from the photos
Flat	Little forward projection: little highlight or shadow, and a flat-looking cheek from the side	Also Cheekbone Prominence (the side-photo lines don’t measure it)
Wide, narrow or big	The width across the face at the cheekbones	Cheekbone width, the base of six ratios, face width to height among them
Hollow	Missing soft tissue below the bone, seen as a deep dip under the cheekbone	Cheek Leanness & Ogee Curve, a rating from the photos

Width and height don’t move together. The 64.1% man on the right is the wider of the two for his face length: about 140 mm across the cheekbones against about 135 mm for the sample face (both estimated). His cheekbones sit no higher: 64.1% against 67.3%, a gap inside this measurement’s noise.

Narrow cheekbones show up in face width to height, the ratio drawn above. A ratio under the range means cheekbones that are narrow for the face’s height, a tall midface, or both. Both faces sit under it, the left by 0.17 and the right by 0.08. Neither looks narrow.

Defined cheekbones vs hollow cheeks

Cheekbones look defined when the cheek below them is lean enough to show a soft shadow. The goal is defined, not hollow or sunken.

Cheekbone Prominence carries 17% of the Angularity pillar and Cheek Leanness & Ogee Curve 16%, against 27.6% for the jaw. All three of our faces score 7 for leanness. Only prominence splits them, and it marks down the man with the highest-set cheekbones.

Face fat follows body fat. Across studies, people guess how heavy someone is for their height from a face alone fairly well, with a correlation of 0.71. Cheek fat is also linked to belly fat.⁴

More hollow is not better. Faces that look underweight and faces that look overweight both score lower on health and attractiveness.⁴ The fullest cheeks scored lowest with every group of raters in a 3D test on one woman’s face. Orthodontists also marked down the most hollowed version and rated it the oldest of seven, while lay raters picked the fullest version as the oldest.⁵

If you check one thing in the mirror, make it the cheek under the bone.

Can a round face have high cheekbones?

Yes. Part of a face’s roundness comes from soft tissue: in one study, young women with a higher BMI had a wider, rounder face outline relative to their eyes and lips.⁶ A jaw close to cheekbone width rounds it too. Cheekbone height varies little from person to person,³ so a round face usually has its cheekbones at about the same height as anyone else’s. They just show less. The three-line test still finds your widest level.

Why cheekbones look flatter with age

The cheekbone itself changes less with age than the upper jaw beside it. Below the eye, the upper jaw loses bone, the lower outer rim of the eye socket (partly formed by the cheekbone) recedes, and the soft tissue over the mid-cheek shifts too.⁷ So your cheeks can look flatter. Where their peak sits seems to hold steady: in one study of people aged 16 to 69, its height didn’t change with age.³

Are high cheekbones attractive?

Less than most pages claim. Prominent cheekbones went with higher attractiveness ratings in two older studies of men’s faces, always alongside other features. A 2018 experiment leaned slightly the other way. We found no study that tests how high cheekbones sit.

The study everyone quotes is Cunningham’s, from 1990. Women rated photos of men. Higher ratings went with prominent cheekbones, a large chin, large eyes, a big smile and high-status clothing. There was a ceiling: the most mature-looking faces weren’t rated the most attractive.⁸ Scheib’s team found the same direction in 1999: a masculinity score built from cheekbone prominence and a longer lower face went with attractiveness, even when women saw only half of each face.⁹

A 2018 study put cheekbones up against four other features, on men’s and women’s faces. Researchers changed the cheekbones, jaw, brows, eye size and face height of composite faces. Then 922 people, most of them white and many of them US students, ranked the results. Cheekbones counted the least of the five, with an importance score of 18.4 against 19.5 to 21.3 for the others. Slightly less prominent cheekbones were preferred on both sexes, a small effect the authors called unexpected for women’s faces. They note the change was subtle, though raters did see the less prominent version as more masculine.¹⁰

In your report, cheekbone height is one small part of the Harmony pillar. You see its value, score and label, but because it’s low confidence it never makes your list of strengths or focus areas (how the report picks them). The sample face shows how little it weighs. It scores 2.5 out of 10 there, labeled Focus area. The whole face still gets 7.0, Good. How defined your cheekbones look counts for more, through the two ratings in Angularity. The Masculinity or Femininity pillar, named for your sex in your report, is led by the jaw and brow ridge and has no cheekbone rating.

One number never decides how attractive someone is, and in our scoring this one hardly registers.

High cheekbones in women and men

Women and men carry their cheekbones at about the same height,³ and our ideal ranges for the two differ by only 1 point. What differs is how full the cheek is around the bone, and how much our ranges expect the face to narrow above and below it.

Women’s cheeks are fuller below the eyes, out toward the cheekbones, while men’s faces project more down the middle, from the brow ridge to the chin. That comes from 3D scans of 342 white Italian adults, so it may not hold everywhere.¹¹ In the mirror, defined cheekbones tend to look rounder and softer on women. On men they tend to show as a sharper edge, with a clearer shadow below it.

Measurement	Men	Women	Sample face
Cheekbone height	83 to 100%	84 to 101%	67.3%
Temples, % of cheekbone width	86.5 to 92.5%	80.5 to 86.5%	85.7%
Jaw corners, % of cheekbone width	87.5 to 91.5%	84 to 88%	89.1%
Face width to height	1.96 to 2.00	1.94 to 1.98	1.79

The analysis asks for your heritage. A different answer nudges a few width ranges; the cheekbone height range never moves.

Our ideal ranges expect a feminine face to narrow more on each side of the cheekbones, with the temples 6 points lower and the jaw corners 3.5 points lower, which leaves the cheekbones more clearly the widest line of the face. Real faces don’t always follow it: one 3D study found relatively wider temples in women.¹¹

Pages that tie high cheekbones to diamond or oval faces are describing this taper: a face that narrows above and below the cheekbones. A heart face narrows mainly below them.

Which sex has more prominent cheekbones is disputed. One study counts cheekbone prominence as a masculine cue,⁹ while another built its feminine faces with more prominent cheekbones.¹⁰ Two studies, two answers, so we won’t pick a side, and your report doesn’t need to: it rates cheekbones in Angularity whatever your sex.

How to get higher-looking cheekbones

You can’t raise the bone, but you can change how much of it shows. Here are the levers, in order of how much they change, in our judgment:

1. Body fat, through ordinary diet and exercise. It’s the biggest lever if you carry extra weight, because cheek fat tracks body fat.⁴ Stop well short of hollow.⁵
2. Makeup, if you wear it. For high cheekbone makeup, placement matters more than the products. Shade along the underside of the bone from in front of the ear toward the corner of the mouth, stopping about under the outer corner of the eye. Highlight the top of the bone and blend blush from the apples up toward the temples. If your cheek line reads low on the photo test, keep the shade short and set it a little higher.
3. Beard, for men. Set your cheek line low enough that the hollow under the cheekbone stays bare skin. A beard that climbs into it fills the shadow in. Go shorter on the cheeks, and a little fuller along the jaw if your jaw reads narrow.
4. Hair and glasses. Hair that hangs over the cheeks hides them, so pull it back or have it cut to fall behind or below the cheekbone. Glasses can hide them too, so pick frames whose lower edge sits clear of the cheekbones. If your face width to height reads under the range, volume at the sides at cheekbone level makes the midface look wider; if it reads over, height on top makes the face look longer. The measured ratio stays the same, since our engine ignores hair.
5. Photos. For a flattering shot, use light from slightly above and to one side, with the camera at eye level and back from your face (see the table above).¹ Save even front light for measuring.

Face exercises and face yoga have no good evidence behind them. A 2014 review of face exercises for an aging face found nine studies, none with a control group or randomization, and called the evidence insufficient.¹² We found no study of mewing for cheekbones, and no evidence that an exercise, massage or face gadget can reshape adult bone.

Check yours first, with the three-line test above or a scan, so you know whether your cheekbones read low, narrow or soft, and which of these tips is worth your time.

You can read the full report on the sample face first.