Face Form Finder

Nose Shape Chart: The Five Measurements Behind Every Label

Most nose shape charts give you a list of names and one sentence about each. They give you no distance. This one does: five nasal measurements in millimetres, taken from 202 people aged 18 to 27 in two ethnic groups, and the ratio that turns two of them into the nose's index.

Only two of the five rows separate the two groups. Nasal length moves by 2.44 mm and tip protrusion by 1.31 mm, and those are the two rows the two groups came out different on. Height and both width readings stay within 0.6 mm of each other — 0.47 mm on height, 0.59 mm on the outer alar points, 0.31 mm on the alar curvatures — and none of those three separated them.

The direction is worth noting as well. The second group's nose is the longer one and its tip projects further forward, while the two widths are near-identical. A chart that gives one width for every nose has averaged away the part that moved.

What each of the five measurements is

Each row is one straight distance between two points you can find on your own face. The two that are easiest to confuse are the first two, because they start at the same place.

Nasal height runs from the nasion — the dip between the brows where the nose begins — down to the subnasale, the point where the base of the nose meets the upper lip. It is taken in the midline.

Nasal length starts at that same nasion point and ends at the pronasale, the most forward point of the tip.

Tip protrusion starts at the subnasale and ends at the pronasale. It is how far the tip sits ahead of the base, not how far the nose is from the face.

Nose width, outer alar points is the widest span between the outer edges of the two wings of the nose.

Nose width, alar curvatures is the span between the two alar curvature points — a second, slightly different pair of landmarks on those same wings.

Because height and length share a starting point, they are not the same number. In the first group they read 44.56 mm and 33.88 mm, a gap of 10.68 mm. In the second group the same pair reads 45.03 mm and 36.32 mm, a gap of 8.71 mm.

The two widths are not the same width

The two width rows look like one measurement written twice. They are not. On the same 116 people, the outer alar span reads 41.27 mm and the alar curvature span reads 44.96 mm — 3.69 mm apart. On the 86 people of the other group the same pair reads 40.68 mm and 45.27 mm, 4.59 mm apart.

Both gaps are larger than the difference between the two groups on either width. So a chart that calls a nose wide has not yet told you which width it means, and the two landmarks it could be using sit further apart than the two groups do.

The index that turns two of them into a shape name

Charts that name nose classes are not reading the millimetres directly. They divide one by the other. The nasal index is nose width divided by nasal height, multiplied by 100, and the class names are read off that single number.

Same formula, same two landmarks, three populations, two different answers. Three of the four Ghana figures sit in the broad class, from 91 to 97. The fourth, the Ewe women at 84.12, sits 0.88 below the 85 line and reads moderate. The group in South India lands in the moderate class at 71.30 and 71.05. Neither reading is a mistake. The index is a ratio, and a ratio moves whenever either of the two numbers behind it moves.

The same population also shows how much of a class name is about the group rather than the individual. In the South Indian group, the two narrowest classes together accounted for 86.67 percent of the men and 96.92 percent of the women, while the broad class accounted for 4.17 percent of the men and none of the women.

The class boundaries are not the same in the two sets

Both groups read their class names off the same formula, but not off the same boundaries.

The moderate band ends at 85 in one set and at 84.9 in the other, so an index falling between those two numbers is moderate under one set and broad under the other. The broad band is open-ended above 85 in one set and stops at 99.9 in the other, so an index of 100 or more is broad under one set and very broad under the other. One set has no very narrow class at all, so a reading of 50 is long and narrow under it and very long and narrow under the other.

That is the part worth carrying away: the name is attached to the band, not to the nose.

Why the same label carries different millimetres

Nose width in the first table reads 41.27 mm across in the first group. In the South Indian group the same span reads 36.37 mm for men aged 20 to 30. Both are real readings of the same measurement.

Height runs the other way: 44.56 mm against 50.86 mm, a gap of 6.30 mm. Those figures come from two different populations measured by two different teams, and the two groups are a decade apart in age as well. So the difference cannot be quoted as one clean number.

What it does show is the thing worth carrying away: a millimetre figure for a nose belongs to the group it was taken from. A chart that gives you one number for a nose shape without saying who was measured has left out the part that decides whether the number applies to you.

The labels, read as ratios

The names that turn up on most nose shape charts are shorthand for relationships between the rows above, not separate categories.

A nose called wide is one where the index row climbs, width growing against height. The two groups in Ghana sit at 84 to 97; the group in South India sits at 71. A nose called narrow is the same row read at the other end.

A nose called long is the nasal length row, or the nasal height row, or both. Since the two share a starting point and differ by 10.68 mm in the first group, the word on its own does not say which one is being described.

Straight, Roman, ski-slope, button, upturned and downturned describe the line of the bridge and the direction the tip points. None of the five distances above records either of those things, because both are contours and angles rather than spans. The one angle either group recorded is the nasal tip angle, which ran from 42 to 59 degrees; 67 of the people measured fell between 41 and 50 degrees and 30 fell between 51 and 60.

That is why one nose can carry two labels at once without any contradiction. Bridge contour and tip direction are two different things, and the two widths are two more.

Where the numbers come from, and where they stop

The five measurements in the first table, and the index in the second, are averages from 202 people aged 18 to 27 belonging to two ethnic groups in Ghana, taken with digital callipers.

The South Indian figures are averages from 305 people aged 20 and above — 240 men and 65 women across three age bands — also taken with digital callipers.

Both sets are narrow in the same direction. Each covers one country and one age range, and neither is a value for people outside that group. The two are also not directly comparable to each other, because they were taken by different teams on different populations.

What this chart cannot tell you

The eye above the nose, measured the same way, is in Eye Shape Chart. The mouth is in Lip Shape Chart. The four readings that build a face shape from the brow ridge down are in Face Shape Chart, and the full index of face shapes is in Different Face Shapes.