Neoteny

Neoteny, in the facial-aesthetics sense, describes the retention of juvenile proportions into an adult face: relatively large eyes set low in the skull, a short midface, a small nose, a rounded jaw and a high forehead. The word is borrowed from developmental biology, where it has a precise meaning about the timing of maturation, and the looksmaxxing usage is looser — it names an appearance rather than a measurement, and no single number decides whether a face has it. It is often discussed as the counterpart to facial masculinisation, and the two are not opposites so much as different axes: a face can read as both angular and neotenous. Nothing about it responds to effort, since every component is bone proportion. It is included here because the term appears constantly and is rarely defined.