What type of nose do I have? Check it with 3 phone photos

Ask “what type of nose do I have” and you expect one word back. You’ll usually need a short list, because one name rarely covers a bridge, a tip and a width. Start with the side photo: a straight bridge alone crosses off Roman, hooked and scooped.

Man A, the one in our sample report, has a straight bridge, a tip that’s upturned, snub and round, and a slightly wide base. That’s five names for one nose. The other three example men we measured got three or four each.

For the quick version, hold your side photo against the bridge outlines, the tip outlines and the “What you see” column in the table further down. Rather not draw lines? Upload a front and side photo and our report draws them. You get numbers and no type name, and that same table turns one into the other.

What nose shape do I have? Start with three photos

To know your nose shape, take three photos from about 5 feet (1.5 m). A close selfie isn’t one of them, and the one from below is only a tiebreaker.

Photo	How to take it	What it settles
Side	A friend or a propped phone on a 10-second timer, about 5 feet (1.5 m) away, lens at eye level, head level	Bridge, root, tip direction and reach
From below	Same distance, head back until your nose tip lines up with the underside of your brow. Skip it if your tip is clear from the side	Tip shape, by eye only (our upload takes front and side)
Front	Same distance, lens at eye level, head level, neutral face	Width, how wide the tip looks

You’ll also need a card edge, your phone’s markup pen, a protractor app and, for the snub check, a ruler.

A phone 12 inches (30 cm) from your face makes your nose measure about 30% wider against your cheekbones, on one geometric model. At 5 feet (1.5 m) there’s essentially no difference,¹ so if your nose looks big in selfies, part of that can be the camera. Keep your hair back, and skip glasses and nose contour.

What type of nose bridge do I have? Straight, Roman, hooked or scooped

Lay a straight edge along your bridge on the side photo. On the edge is straight, past it is a hump, behind it is a scoop. If you only do one check, do this one. We’d trust it most by hand, and it needs no protractor.

Roman and hooked both sit past the edge (aquiline gets used for both). On a Roman nose the tip’s tilt stays inside our range, and on a hooked nose it sits lower, which the level-photo check measures.

1. Zoom in until your nose fills about 4 inches (10 cm) of the screen, from the dip between your eyes to the tip.
2. Hold a card edge so it touches your bridge a quarter of the way down from the dip (about 1 inch, or 2.5 cm, at this zoom) and just above the tip, not on it.
3. Look at the gap.

All four of our example men have straight bridges, and the outline stayed within about 1 mm of the edge at life size, by our estimate. That’s about 2 mm on screen at this zoom, roughly the thickness of a coin, so treat a clear gap past that as a hump if the outline sits in front of the edge, or a scoop if it dips behind. It’s our rule of thumb. None of the four has either, so we can’t say exactly where one starts. That says nothing about how common a hump is. Four men is a tiny sample.

Run the card down to the tip itself and the outline just above it pokes past the edge, which is only the tip rounding off. The card checks the line and not the height, so a low bridge can still be straight.

The dip at the root separates straight from Greek

Greek is a straight nose with almost no dip at the root, the spot between your eyes. Draw from your forehead between the brows to the deepest point between your eyes, then down to just above the tip. The men’s range is 116 to 128 degrees, and 128 or more leans Greek. That’s a low bar: men in two published samples averaged close to it or past it, by different methods.²³ So call it Greek only if your forehead and bridge also look like one line. Man D clears the mark at 130.0 and still shows a small dip in the photo below.

If you’re a woman, go by eye. Our report’s range for women runs 139 to 151, but those two samples put men and women only 5 to 9 degrees apart,²³ so we wouldn’t treat 151 as a line you have to clear.

Upturned and snub noses start with a level photo

This is the fiddliest check on the page, so do it once and do it slowly. On our report’s ranges, an upturned nose passes two tests. Tip rotation is how far the underside of your nose tilts above level, and a plus means it points up. The nose-to-lip angle is the corner where that underside meets your upper lip. A man passes at over +21.5 and over 114 degrees, a woman at over +30.5 and over 118. Treat the 118 loosely: the two samples from the Greek check found no significant gap between men and women on this angle.²³

1. Find the lowest point of the bony rim under your eye with a fingertip. With your phone’s markup pen, draw from your ear opening to that point. Save it, then use the straighten slider in your photo editor until the line is flat.
2. Draw along the underside of your nose from where it meets your lip, and stop halfway to the tip.
3. Draw from the same point down the front of your upper lip.
4. A protractor app gives you both angles. Without one, +21.5 is about a quarter of a right angle, and 114 is a right angle plus about a quarter. For women, +30.5 is about a third of a right angle, and 118 is a right angle plus a little under a third.

If the card found a hump, go by rotation alone. For men, +11.5 to +21.5 is Roman, under that leans hooked (more clearly the nearer the tip gets to level), and over it no single name fits, so write both: hump and upturned. Women’s numbers are in the table below.

Don’t skip the level line. It sat 2 to 5 degrees off the camera’s horizontal on our four photos, in either direction. Skip it and Man D jumps from +21.1, inside the range, to +26.1, past the cut-off.

The halfway stop looks fussy until you skip it. On our four men, drawing to the very tip over-reads by about 6 to 20 degrees, and all of them, even Man D, would land well past +21.5.

Our rule uses two tests, because one angle can mislead. In 100 volunteers, no single way of measuring how far a tip turns up worked for everyone, and a sloped upper lip was one of the things that threw them off.⁴ All four men have upper lips that slope forward. Man C’s slopes most, about 26 degrees, so he measures +26.5 with a nose-to-lip angle of 91.0. That low second number comes from his lip, not his nose.

These short lines are touchy. A 1 mm slip at life size moves the root angle 3 to 6 degrees and tip rotation 5 to 7, and our report marks rotation Low confidence. We’d only trust a reading that clears the cut-off by about 5 degrees. We found no study of phone photos marked by hand. Treat your readings as rough.

Snub is upturned plus a short reach, and reach takes two lengths, both drawn on Man C’s bridge photo above. Measure level from the back of your nostril wing to the tip (his short level line), then from the tip up the bridge line to the height of your root (his dashed line). Divide the first by the second, which gives him 0.54. Under 0.58 for men or 0.55 for women counts as short. A short reach alone means nothing. All four men come in at 0.51 to 0.56, and only Man A also passes both upturned tests.

Round tips, button noses and the view from below

Judge round by eye against the tip outlines. A button is a small round tip with a modest reach and a slight upturn, on a nose that looks small overall.

Don’t measure the tip angle yourself. Its points sit 5 to 7 mm from the tip, so 1 mm at life size moves it 8 to 12 degrees. Our report marks it Low confidence too. All four men sit past the men’s cut-off of 138.5. None of them is a button.

The view from below is a tiebreaker for the tip and gives no number. One study of 121 photos from below said there was no distinct boundary between the six base shapes it sorted, none of them button or round.⁵ Check whether the tip looks small and round or wide and full, then stop. Every nose shows more nostril from this angle, and nostril shape doesn’t change your name. An upturned tip doesn’t always mean visible nostrils head-on either. Man A’s turns up most, yet our report still rates his Nostril exposure 9 of 10, where 10 means no issue.

If this view disagrees with the side photo on the bridge or tip direction, believe the side photo.

The front photo decides if your nose is wide or narrow

Compare your nose base with the gap between your inner eye corners. A man’s range is 1.04 to 1.16 times the gap and a woman’s 0.94 to 1.06. Above that is wide, below it is narrow. The top photo on this page shows both lines on Man D.

Mark that gap on a paper edge and lay it across the outer edges of your nostril wings, not the openings. Inside the range, a man’s base runs a little past the mark, by up to about a sixth of the gap, and a woman’s about matches it.

Three of our four men come out wide, with Man D inside the range. That’s ordinary. In 100 adults photographed from 5 feet, the nose was the wider of the two in 88%. The averages of 1.17 for men and 1.13 for women both sit past our wide cut-offs,² so wide here only means past our scoring range. The eye gap is also your ruler, so close-set eyes can push an ordinary nose past the cut-off.

So what type of nose do I have?

Your answer comes in three parts, bridge, tip and width, plus the nearest common name if one fits. It might look like this: straight, upturned, wide, and snub if the tip also stops short.

Name	What you see	Men	Women
Straight	Outline stays on the edge	Card gap under about 2 mm on screen	Same test
Greek	Straight, almost no dip at the root	Root angle 128° or more	By eye; our range runs 139 to 151°
Roman	Hump past the edge, tip tilt inside our range	Rotation +11.5 to +21.5°	+20.5 to +30.5°
Hooked	Hump and a low tip	Rotation under +11.5°	Under +20.5°
Scooped	Dips behind the edge, tip up	Rotation over +21.5°	Over +30.5°
Upturned	Tip up on both tests	Over +21.5° and over 114°	Over +30.5° and over 118°
Snub	Upturned and a short reach	Reach under 0.58	Under 0.55
Round tip	Rounded, not narrow	By eye; report tip angle over 138.5°	By eye; over 136.5°
Button	Small nose, round tip, slight upturn	Round tip, and small by eye	Same test
Bulbous	Round tip that also looks wide from the front	By eye	By eye
Wide	Base wider than the range	Over 1.16 times the eye gap	Over 1.06
Narrow	Base narrower than the range	Under 1.04 times the eye gap	Under 0.94

If no row fits your tip or width, write what’s left: mid-range tilt or medium width inside the range, and low tip under the rotation range with no hump. If rotation passes and nose-to-lip doesn’t, write leaning upturned when the miss is a few degrees, like Man B. Further off, skip the direction and write the tip shape alone, like Man C’s round. That’s a complete answer.

Our four men on the men’s cut-offs. All four have straight bridges and still come out four different ways. Tip numbers are rotation, then nose-to-lip.

Man	Bridge	Tip	Width	Nearest name
A (our sample report)	Straight	Upturned on both tests (+35.9, 124.4), short reach (0.51), round	Wide, 1.20	Snub
B	Straight, deepest root at 115.0	Just misses upturned (+33.4, 113.2), only just round	Wide, 1.27	Straight, leaning upturned
C	Straight	Not upturned (+26.5, 91.0, his lip slopes forward), round	Wide, 1.26	Straight with a round tip; no single name fits
D (top of this page)	Straight, root 130.0	Mid-range tilt, near the top (+21.1, 99.2), round	Medium, 1.08	Leans Greek

Each man collects three to five names.

We found no study that sets the angle where one nose type becomes another, so we set these cut-offs ourselves, at the edges of the ranges our report scores against. A value just past one only leans that way, and a reading within a few degrees can land on either side.

Pointed, fleshy, flat and crooked are on the full chart of nose names. Some charts say celestial or retroussé for upturned, and hawk for hooked.

We found no proper count of these names, so ignore any chart that calls one the rarest. Our chart guide covers how many nose types there are and why nobody can rank them.

Can a nose shape test, quiz, scanner or detector tell you your type?

Partly. A nose shape detector or AI scanner can read width from a front photo, and a quiz can give you a word to test. Neither settles the names that depend on your profile.

We checked the US results for this search on 2026-11-01. All four scanners we could check in the top 12 start from a front photo, and three of them say on their own pages that a front view can’t reliably show the bridge. One makes you pick your bridge shape yourself, and the top result hands back only a width-to-height band. The closest published detector we found reads only width against height from one front photo, and its authors say it leaves out depth and tip reach and hasn’t been tested on real patient photos.⁶

A nose shape quiz asks you to label your nose by eye, and a mostly-As quiz can’t return a mix. Labels given by eye also often disagree. In a forensic study built on photos of 900 men, people sorting 43 face features, the nose among them, mismatched 19% to 39% of the time, even with a reference atlas in hand.⁷ That goes for the by-eye rows in our table too. Hold round, button and bulbous loosely.

A chart that hands you exactly one name is telling you less than your own side photo.

Ours takes a front and a side photo and draws every line on them, so you can see where each point landed and how the measurements work. No published study has tested our numbers either, which is why the lines are there for you to check.

What to do with your answer

Treat your answer as a description. The studies on which shape people prefer don’t crown a winner. In our own scoring, your nose ratings make up about a tenth of Masculinity or Femininity and about 8% of Features, two of your 4 pillar scores. In Harmony, 15 of the 65 measurements touch your nose. One number never decides how attractive someone is.

You didn’t pick this shape. It comes partly from genes, and nostril width partly tracks the climate your ancestors lived in. It also drifts slowly: 48 adults scanned about 12 years apart had noses about 1.4 to 1.7 mm longer in profile.⁸ Rhinoplasty changes the structure, and that’s a medical decision we stay out of.

Two styling habits are yours to use, though we found no test of either. A lens at eye level or a little above shows less nostril, and a glasses bridge on or just under a hump breaks up the profile. The chart guide has beard and contour tips by type.

Surgeons often say how big a nose looks depends partly on how far forward the chin sits. We found no direct test of that, but look at your whole face before you decide your nose is the problem.

Write your answer down. If any word in it surprises you, retake that photo from 5 feet and check again before you believe it.