Face Form Finder

Chin Shapes: The Numbers Behind the Names

Most chin shape pages give you a list of names and a sentence on how to spot each one. They give you no count and no distance. This page keeps the names, then adds the two things they leave out: how often a cleft chin and a double chin turn up across 3,143 photographed chins, and the millimetres the chin reads at four measured groups.

The three figures in the last column are the ones the count was given in. The men and women columns are those same counts read against each sex. The counts behind them — 70, 440, 53, 1,305 and 1,275 — come from those three shares against the two group sizes, and they add back to 1,815 and 1,328 exactly.

The names people use, and how to tell them apart

Thirteen names are in circulation for the lower end of the face. They are not thirteen of one thing. Each one is named from a different feature, which is why two of them can sit on the same chin.

1. Cleft chin — a vertical groove or a dimple running down the centre of the chin pad.
2. Double chin — a fold of tissue under the chin that reads as a second chin below the first.
3. Receding chin — the lower jaw sits back of the upper jaw, so the chin point falls behind the lip line.
4. Protruding chin — the lower jaw sits forward of the upper jaw, so the chin point passes the lip line.
5. Square chin — the outline keeps a corner at each side and the jaw line stays wide to the end.
6. Round chin — the outline runs on a curve with no corner where the jaw turns.
7. Pointed chin — the outline narrows toward the end and finishes in a point rather than a flat.
8. Long chin — the run from the groove above the chin down to the bottom reads longer than the rest of the face allows.
9. Short chin — the same run reads small against the rest of the face.
10. Narrow chin — the width at the end reads small against the width at the jaw corners.
11. Wide chin — the width at the end reads broad against the rest of the lower face.
12. Fleshy chin — the pad over the bone is thick enough to change the outline the bone would give.
13. Crooked chin — the centre of the chin sits off the midline of the face.

Two of those thirteen carry a count on this page: cleft and double. The other eleven do not, and no row of the table above has a box for them.

What the counts say

Cleft is the rarest of the three and the least evenly spread. All 70 of the 70 counted sit in the men's group; the women's group holds none. Read against its own group, that is 3.86 percent of the men and 0.00 percent of the women.

Double chin is the one that separates the two groups most sharply. It is 24.24 percent of the men and 3.99 percent of the women, a gap of 20.25 points. The share of the whole — 15.69 percent — sits between the two and belongs to neither.

Normal chin is the reverse: 96.01 percent of the women and 71.90 percent of the men. Almost every woman in the set carried neither of the two named features, against just under three men in four.

The three names do not divide the set evenly, and they are not three sizes of one thing. Cleft is a feature on the surface of the chin pad. Double chin is tissue below the chin. Normal chin is the absence of both. A chin can be square and normal at the same time, and nothing in the count above would show it.

The millimetres behind the chin

Distances come from four other groups. None of them counted shape names, so no cell in this table carries one.

A dash means the group did not report that reading. The four groups did not measure the same set of points, so most cells are dashes and no column is complete.

Chin height is the reading that separates the two groups that both report it. Kenya reads 36.5 mm for the men and 34.1 mm for the women; Saudi Arabia reads 30.84 mm and 28.09 mm. That is a gap of 5.66 mm between the men and 6.01 mm between the women — both larger than the sex gap inside either group, which is 2.75 mm in Saudi Arabia and 2.4 mm in Kenya.

Lower face height separates them further. Kenya reads 76.4 mm for the men against 63.26 mm in Saudi Arabia, a gap of 13.14 mm. Between the women it is 69.5 mm against 59.53 mm, a gap of 9.97 mm. The Iranian women sit between the two at 65.08 mm in their twenties, 65.63 mm in their thirties and 67.22 mm in their forties, so the whole spread across the three groups is 16.87 mm at its widest.

Jaw width at the corners runs the other way from chin height. Saudi Arabia reads 124.27 mm for the men and 116.26 mm for the women; Kenya reads 106.6 mm and 96.8 mm. So the group with the longer chin height has the narrower jaw, by 17.67 mm between the men.

Sex moves every size reading in the same direction: men larger. Chin height by 2.75 mm and 2.4 mm, lower face height by 3.73 mm and 6.9 mm, jaw width by 8.01 mm and 9.8 mm. Chin prominence is the exception. It reads 11.50 mm for the Saudi men and 12.19 mm for the Saudi women, so it runs 0.69 mm the other way.

The three tissue readings are a different kind of number: they are the depth of soft tissue lying over the bone, not the size of the chin. All three are deeper in the men. Tissue over the chin point reads 12.29 mm against 10.95 mm, a gap of 1.34 mm. Under the chin it reads 9.20 mm against 6.99 mm, a gap of 2.21 mm. At the groove above the chin it reads 13.89 mm against 12.13 mm, a gap of 1.76 mm.

Age moves those three in the same direction as each other. Over the three age bands in that group, tissue over the chin point goes 11.06 mm to 11.54 mm to 12.12 mm, a rise of 1.06 mm. Under the chin it goes 7.65 mm to 7.93 mm to 8.75 mm, a rise of 1.10 mm. At the groove above the chin it goes 12.64 mm to 12.89 mm to 13.52 mm, a rise of 0.88 mm. The Iranian women show the same direction on size: their lower face height rises 2.14 mm across their three bands.

Why the two tables do not combine

Both tables are about the chin. They are not two halves of one table.

The first counts names. The second measures distances. Nothing in either set links a name to a distance. No group here reports how long a cleft chin is, or how wide a square one is, and no row of millimetres carries a shape label.

The two are taken differently as well. A shape name is assigned by looking at a chin and putting it in one of three boxes. The millimetres come from points marked on a scan or held against the face. A name and a distance are two different kinds of reading of the same chin.

So there is no column on this page that turns a shape name into a number, and no row that turns a number into a name. A page that hands you a length for a named chin shape is not repeating either table here, because neither table contains that link.

What the names cover, and what they leave out

The thirteen names are not thirteen boxes that a chin goes into. Two of them describe where the lower jaw sits, three describe the outline, two describe the width, two describe the run from the groove above the chin to the bottom, one describes the depth of the pad, one the alignment, and two name a feature on the surface. A single chin can be described by three or four of them at once.

Only two of the thirteen have ever been counted in the set above, and the count is not a count of the outline. Cleft and double are both surface or tissue features. Nothing here says how many chins are square, or round, or pointed.

The counted set is also smaller than it looks. Three boxes were used, and one of them is the absence of the other two. So the counts above answer two questions and leave the rest of the list uncounted.

Where these numbers come from, and where they stop

The counts come from 3,143 pictures of chins gathered from the internet, 1,815 of men and 1,328 of women, each one put into one of the three boxes by a single reader.

The sizes come from 94 adults aged 18 to 30 in Saudi Arabia, measured on three-dimensional scans; from 72 adults aged 18 to 30 in Kenya, measured directly on the face; and from 225 women aged 20 to 50 in Iran, measured from photographs in profile and from the front.

The tissue depths come from 200 CT scans of adults in Azerbaijan, 107 men and 93 women, sorted into three age bands.

None of the four is a figure for people in general. Each covers one country, one age range and one method, and the four were taken by different teams. The counts and the distances were not taken from the same people, and no person appears in both tables.

What this chart cannot tell you

The line the chin sits on is in Jawline Shape, and the four readings that build a face shape from the brow ridge down are in Face Shape Chart. The ear above it, counted the same way, is in Ear Shapes. The names for the whole face are in Different Face Shapes.