What's a good fWHR? Averages, high vs low + free calculator
Facial width-to-height ratio — fWHR — is cheekbone (bizygomatic) width divided by upper-face height. A higher number means a broader, shorter-looking upper face; a lower one means a longer, narrower one. It has become a staple of online face analysis, usually with more confidence than the science supports.
What counts as a high or low fWHR?
Measured on soft tissue from a photo, most adult faces land roughly between 1.6 and 2.1, clustering around 1.8–1.9. A ratio above about 2.0 reads as a high fWHR (broad, compact upper face), below about 1.7 as a low fWHR (longer, narrower upper face). Treat those as descriptive bands, not cut-offs: the two measurement conventions below shift the numbers, so a single value like "2.0" means little without knowing how it was measured.
How to measure your fWHR
Take a front-on photo with a level head and neutral expression, then divide the distance between the outer cheekbones (zygion to zygion) by the height from the upper lip to the mid-brow. Doing this by eye in a photo editor is error-prone — landmark placement moves the result more than most real face differences. Our free analyzer locates the landmarks automatically and reports your fWHR alongside 36 other proportions, so you can skip the ruler work: analyze your face free.
It was never a beauty metric
fWHR came out of evolutionary biology, not aesthetics. Early work by Weston measured it on skulls; Carre and McCormick later linked it to perceived dominance and certain behaviours, not attractiveness. That distinction matters: fWHR is mostly a signal of how dominant or mature a face reads, which is a different question from whether people find it appealing.
What we see in the ratings
In the faces we scored against human ratings, a lower fWHR — a less wide, longer-looking upper face — tended to track with higher attractiveness, gently. So the popular idea that a high fWHR is the masculine ideal does not match our data; it lines up better with dominance than with appeal. As always, it is one weak signal among many, not destiny.
A measurement footnote that trips people up
There are two common definitions of fWHR — one using the bony skull, one using soft tissue (skin) — and they give noticeably different numbers. A lot of online arguments are really people comparing the two without realizing it. We use the soft-tissue version measured from your photo, which is the only one you can get without an X-ray, and we report it as context rather than a verdict.
If you want to interpret your own fWHR, hold it loosely: it describes face shape more than face quality, the two definitions disagree, and weight changes it (a fuller face widens the apparent ratio). It is a useful descriptor of whether your upper face reads broad or long — and not much more than that. If you just want the number, the fWHR calculator measures it from one photo.