Are my facial thirds balanced?

Forehead, midface and lower third, as percentages that sum to 100.

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Midface over lower face, with all three thirds reported. Measured on your device. Nothing is uploaded.

What this measures

The classical canon divides the face into three equal horizontal parts: hairline to brow, brow to the base of the nose, and the base of the nose to the bottom of the chin. This tool measures all three from your photo and reports each as a percentage of total face height, so they always sum to 100. The score is the ratio of the midface to the lower third, because those are the two the mesh can locate; the spread a viewer notices is dominated by them — a face where one third dominates reads as long-midfaced or short-chinned regardless of what the other two do. One honest caveat about the upper third: the face mesh stops at the top of the modelled forehead rather than at your actual hairline, so a receding or high hairline makes the upper third measure smaller than it is. The lower two are reliable.

How to read this

Each third is a percentage of total face height. Equal thirds would be 33.3 each.
The score is the midface divided by the lower face, targeting 1.0 — the two thirds a photo can actually measure.
The upper third is a proxy: it is measured to the top of the modelled forehead, not to your hairline.
A long midface and a short lower third are the two most common imbalances, and neither is a defect.

Midface over lower face, with all three thirds reported.

Long lower face 0 – 0.85: The lower third is noticeably longer than the midface. Common, and the most flattered by a camera held above eye level.
Balanced 0.85 – 1.15: Midface and lower face within about 15% of each other — what the canon asks for.
Long midface 1.15 – 1.4: The midface runs longer than the lower third. The most common imbalance of the two.
Strongly long midface 1.4 – 4: Well beyond the usual spread. Check the camera was at eye level: shooting from below foreshortens the lower third and inflates this.

Method

Every measurement here comes from 478 facial landmarks detected by Google's MediaPipe face mesh, running as WebAssembly in your browser. The face is levelled by the eye line before anything is measured, and every distance is normalised so the result does not depend on your camera or how close you stood to it.

Questions

What are the facial thirds?

Hairline to glabella (the flat patch between the brows), glabella to subnasale (where the nose meets the upper lip), and subnasale to the bottom of the chin. The convention, which goes back to Vitruvius by way of Leonardo, wants the three to be equal.

Can facial thirds be changed?

Not by anything non-surgical. The proportions are set by the skull. What does change is how they read — a hairstyle changes the apparent upper third, and posture and body fat change how much of the lower third is visible.

Why is my upper third measured as smaller than it looks?

The face mesh ends at the top of the modelled forehead, which sits below most hairlines. That makes the upper third systematically shorter than a measurement taken to the real hairline, and the effect is larger the higher your hairline is.

Measure something else

The app's harmony score reads all three thirds together with the rest of the proportions.