What every face shape chart is actually telling you

Every chart is one rule wearing different names

The rule is that an oval outline is treated as the target, and every recommendation on every chart is a move towards it. A round face is told to add length below the chin. A long face is told to keep the sides fuller and the chin short. Those read as opposite advice and they are the same instruction pointed in different directions.

Once the rule is visible the chart becomes optional. You do not need somebody to look up your row for you. You need to know which direction your own face sits furthest from that target, and that is a question you can answer in a mirror rather than in a table.

The outline is not the part the beard sits on

Face shape charts sort by the silhouette of the whole head, forehead included. A beard occupies the lower third of that silhouette and nothing above it, so most of what the chart measured is information the beard has no way to act on.

That is why two men who land in the same row get different results from the same style. Their outlines match and their jaws do not, and the jaw is what a beard is actually shaped around.

Three things worth measuring instead of naming

Each of these takes seconds in front of a mirror, and each one points at a direction rather than at a style. Together they do the job the chart was attempting, with your proportions in it instead of a drawing of somebody else.

• Jaw against cheekbone. Look at whether your face is widest across the cheekbones or across the jaw. Widest higher up means the beard has room to build width low down. Already widest at the jaw means adding more there works against you.
• Room below the chin. Some faces have a long run from the lower lip to the underside of the chin and some have very little. That distance decides how much length a beard can carry at the bottom before it stops reading as a beard and starts reading as a shape hanging off the face.
• Where your growth actually reaches. Whether cheek growth stops high or runs most of the way up, and whether the corners of the jaw fill in at all. This is the constraint that overrules the other two, because a beard you cannot grow is not an option however well it scores on a chart.

Turn each measurement into a direction, not a name

Widest at the jaw means taking width out at the sides and keeping length at the chin modest. Widest at the cheekbones is the opposite, and a fuller jaw is what balances it. Little room below the chin means the beard has to do its work through the cheek line, because there is nowhere for length to go.

Only once those directions are settled does a style name mean anything, because a name is shorthand for a set of directions somebody else already chose. A goatee is length at the chin and nothing at the sides. A full beard tapered towards the chin is the same direction with more coverage. A beard fade removes the boundary between hair and beard, so the sides read narrower than they measure.

The round face guide works one row of the chart all the way through on exactly this basis, including the cheek line and neckline decisions that carry most of the result.

Why no two charts agree

Face shape is not a measurement. It is a judgement about which of a small set of drawings your reflection resembles most, and two people looking at the same face will place it in different rows. So will the same person on different days, which is enough on its own to produce charts that contradict each other.

The categories also collapse faces that behave differently. Broad and round are not the same face and usually land in the same row. A soft jaw and a defined jaw under the same outline call for opposite amounts of beard, and no chart has a column for that.

Directions survive all of this. You can be genuinely unsure whether you are square or oblong and still be completely certain that your face is widest at the jaw, and the second fact is the one that changes what you ask for.

What to ask for, and what to bring

Ask in directions. Narrower through the cheeks, more length at the chin, a lower cheek line. That survives the fact that one style name means different things in different shops, and it gives a barber something to work with that a photograph of a model does not.

Then settle the shape on your own face rather than on somebody else. A render puts it on your jaw, with your growth pattern and your hairline, which is the part every chart has to leave out. It takes seconds, against the weeks a real beard needs to answer the same question.

See these on your own face

• full beard
• goatee styles
• beard fade

Questions