Face Form Finder
Eyebrow Shape Chart: The Six Distances Behind Every Brow Shape
A shape name is the easy half of a brow chart. What most charts leave out is a distance. The table below gives six, in millimetres, read from 294 eyes in a three-dimensional scan and split across four groups.
| What is measured | Chinese men | Chinese women | Caucasian men | Caucasian women |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brow length, end to end | 68.54 mm | 61.99 mm | 69.54 mm | 61.37 mm |
| Lower brow edge to the inner corner of the eye | 18.55 mm | 19.42 mm | 17.36 mm | 17.52 mm |
| Lower brow edge to the outer corner of the eye | 13.55 mm | 15.21 mm | 15.92 mm | 18.53 mm |
| Lower brow edge to the upper eyelid | 10.55 mm | 11.48 mm | 11.91 mm | 14.23 mm |
| Lower brow edge to the outer edge of the iris | 10.01 mm | 10.64 mm | 9.73 mm | 12.04 mm |
| Inner eye corners, corner to corner | 37.28 mm | 36.06 mm | 32.12 mm | 30.35 mm |
Three of the six rows move a great deal between the groups and three barely move at all. Brow length is the steadiest: 68.54 mm against 69.54 mm for the two male groups, and 61.99 mm against 61.37 mm for the two female groups. That is a 1.00 mm gap between the two male groups and a 0.62 mm gap between the two female groups, while the gap between the male and female averages runs to 7.36 mm. The distance from the brow down to the outer corner of the eye behaves in the opposite way: it runs from 13.55 mm to 18.53 mm, a spread of 4.98 mm, which is more than a third of the smallest value in that row.
Two more readings are worth pulling out. The inner corners of the eyes sit further apart in the two Chinese groups than in the two Caucasian groups — 37.28 mm and 36.06 mm against 32.12 mm and 30.35 mm, a gap of about 5.4 mm between the group averages. And the brow sits further above the eyelid in both female groups than in either male group: 11.48 mm and 14.23 mm against 10.55 mm and 11.91 mm. Neither gap is visible in a mirror. Both change how much bare skin shows between brow and eye, which is the thing a photograph actually records.
What each of the six readings measures
Five of the six run from the same starting line: the lower edge of the brow. That edge is used because it is the one part of a brow that does not depend on how the hairs were brushed or trimmed.
Brow length is the whole brow from its inner end to its outer end, taken straight across.
To the inner corner of the eye is the drop from the lower brow edge down to the point where the upper and lower lids meet on the nose side.
To the outer corner of the eye is the same drop on the temple side, and it is the reading that decides how far the brow tail reaches past the eye.
To the upper eyelid is the drop to the lid edge taken at the outer end. It sets the strip of bare skin between brow and eye.
To the outer edge of the iris is the drop to the far rim of the coloured ring. It is the smallest of the four drops in every group in the table.
Inner eye corners, corner to corner is not a brow reading at all. It is the reference distance that the two ratios further down are built on.
The two ratios that decide arch height and brow weight
A distance in millimetres describes one brow. A ratio describes a brow against the face it sits on, which is why the shape rules are written as ratios rather than as measurements.
| Rule | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| Arch height ÷ inner-corner distance | 1.2 | 1.2 |
| Brow width ÷ inner-corner distance | 0.4–0.5 | 0.25–0.35 |
| Where the peak sits | on or outside the outer corner of the eye | on or outside the outer corner of the eye |
The first row is the one that surprises people. A peak rising to 1.2 times the distance between the inner corners is the value a measurement set of 1,482 East Asian faces settled on, and it is the same figure for men and women. The second row is where the two sexes part company: men read 0.4 to 0.5 and women 0.25 to 0.35, so at the middle of each range the male brow carries about 1.5 times the width for the same face.
Where the arch should sit, worked through
Both rules can be combined with the first table to get a figure in millimetres. Take the inner-corner distance from the first table and multiply it by 1.2.
At 37.28 mm between the inner corners the matching arch figure comes to 44.74 mm. At 30.35 mm between the inner corners it comes to 36.42 mm. Two faces that both carry a correctly placed brow therefore sit 8.32 mm apart in arch height, and the difference comes from the width of the face rather than from anything about the brow itself.
Read that as arithmetic on two group figures, not as a measurement of any one person. The 1.2 is a group ideal and the inner-corner distances are group averages; neither was taken from a single face.
The four shapes most charts give you
Rounded, straight, arched and S-shaped are the four names that turn up in almost every eyebrow shape chart. They are not wrong. They are descriptions of where the brow bends.
Rounded is one even curve with no sharp point at the top.
Straight runs flat across, with the arch lowered to nearly nothing.
Arched lifts to a single defined point, sitting at or past the outer corner of the eye.
S-shaped dips once near the inner end before rising to the peak.
Two things separate the four, and only two: where along the brow the peak sits, and how far it rises. Both are the ratios in the table above. That is why one face can carry a rounded brow and an arched brow and read as two different people, even though the outline drawn around the brow barely changes.
The twelve types a measurement set uses
Four names are a short list. A twelve-type set has also been built on 1,482 East Asian faces, and it does not line up one for one with the four names above. It splits the same brows into finer groups, so a chart built on four names and a chart built on twelve describe overlapping sets rather than the same set.
That matters when you compare one chart with another. Two charts can both be right about your brow and still give it different names, because they draw the dividing lines in different places. If you have been told your brow is straight and another chart calls it rounded, the two labels are not in conflict; they come from different systems.
Where the numbers come from, and where they stop
The six distances are averages from 294 eyes belonging to 147 people aged 18 to 30, scanned in three dimensions and split into the four groups in the first table. They are averages, not targets.
The two ratios and the twelve-type set come from a wider reading of 1,482 East Asian faces, together with a separate preference check of 513 people. The preference check asked which brow looked better, which is a different question from which brow is more common, and the two answers are not interchangeable.
Both sets are narrow in the same way. Everyone measured was young, and only two ancestries are represented. A brow outside those ages or outside those ancestries is not described here.
What this chart cannot tell you
Nothing on this page is a pass or a fail. A brow that sits 2 mm away from one of these averages is not a wrong brow, and a shape with no row above is not a defect.
Density, colour, grey and the difference between a person's two brows are all left out. So is anything about how a brow reads after shaping, tinting or transplanting, because every figure above was taken from an unaltered brow.
The four groups cover two ancestries only. No row above should be read as a universal value, and none of them was measured on a child or on anyone over 30.
The eye features that sit under the brow are set out in Eye Shape Chart. The four readings that build a face shape from the brow ridge down are in Face Shape Chart. The line above the brow, measured the same way, is in Hairline Shapes.