Face Shape, Style Essences, and Your Best Hair?
To find your best hair, should you consider your face shape or your style type? Or both?
Below we explore:
Pros of Face Shape
Cons of Face Shape
Finding Your Best Hair (from a style essences perspective)
Part 1: Pros of Face Shape
Knowing your face shape can be extremely helpful for finding your best hair length—sometimes even more helpful than knowing your style essences.
For instance, Emma Stone is a dominant Ethereal, with a dreamy, mystical vibe:
Emma Stone is highly Ethereal, with smaller amounts of Classic and Gamine. She’s great in hair with narrow Ethereal waves.
What’s confusing is that while Ethereal generally prefers long hair, Emma’s most flattering hair seems closer to short or moderate, as seen above.
Why this apparent contradiction? It’s likely because even though Emma is primarily Ethereal, her overall face shape is not elongated.
So hair around shoulder-length—which flatters her Classic and is ok for her Gamine—really suits her, because this hair length harmonizes with her face length.
In contrast, very long Ethereal hair feels disjointed when paired with her shorter face shape—it doesn’t match.
Key Takeaways:
The length of your best hair might not be the length preferred by your dominant essence.
This is especially true if your face shape doesn’t reflect your dominant essence.
To find your best hair length, considering your face shape can be critical.
Side Note: Why Ethereal can be Hard to See
Emma Stone also illustrates why Ethereal is often missed in faces:
Ethereal is stereotypically associated with vertical elongation, like having a long forehead, nose, and overall face shape.
But some faces are Ethereal mostly (or even solely) because of horizontal elongation, such as of the eyes, brows, or lips.
The Ethereal essence is often overlooked in vertically short faces, since having a short face shape defies Ethereal stereotypes.
I suspect this is true of Emma Stone: despite her short face shape, she likely she has lots of Ethereal in her eyes, lips, and/or brows.
And eyes, lips, and brows are arguably our most noticeable facial features, and thus the ones that contribute most to our style types.
(Humans may be wired to focus on eyes, lips, and brows partly because these are the facial features most relevant to expressing emotions. These features also tend to be the ones we emphasize the most with makeup.)
In short: don’t discount Ethereal just because your face shape is short!
Part 2: Cons of Face Shape
Despite its usefulness, the concept of face shape also has limitations:
Limitation 1: Bias
Some people claim that certain face shapes are the most desirable.
But in truth:
Even if a face shape is more common or represented than other face shapes, that doesn’t make it better or more beautiful. Popular does not equate to beautiful. The most popular songs, for instance, aren’t necessarily the best or the most beautiful. (Some might even argue they’re the opposite!)
Additionally, all kinds of face shapes are widely recognized as beautiful. Consider beauty icons like Selena Gomez, who has a rather short, round face shape, and Bella Hadid, who has a rather elongated, more angular one. These women aren’t beautiful in spite of having notably short or long, round or angular faces—they’re beautiful because of it. It contributes to their uniqueness.
Plus, short faces tend to read as “neotenous” (youthful in a way that’s considered conventionally attractive), whereas long faces often read as sexually mature (since adults tend to have longer faces than children) and even modelesque (since many fashion models have elongated faces). Moderate length faces are beautiful, too, with their balanced appeal.
So one limitation of face shape advice is that it sometimes claims there’s a single best shape.
Limitation 2: Backwards Advice
Face shape advice also sometimes recommends working against your natural beauty—saying things like, “If you have an angular face, you should ‘soften’ it with waves.”
The problems with this are:
A. This advice often doesn’t work, since when you put contrasting shapes next to each other, it tends to amplify their differences.
Imagine someone who’s 7 feet tall standing next to someone who’s 4 feet tall. The tall person is going to look even taller than usual, and the short person even shorter than usual, because of their contrasting heights.
Similarly, if soft, wavy hair is paired with an angular face, this can sometimes “soften” the face (especially if the hair is covering part of the face). But what’s more likely to happen is that the face’s angularity will be actually be emphasized, because of the contrast between the angular face and the hair’s curvy shapes.
And the bigger issue is that B., the advice to disguise our true face shapes encourages us to develop an aversion to the very characteristics that make us unique and beautiful.
Angularity is beautiful. So are softer faces. You don’t need to use your hair to make your face shape resemble whatever one the beauty industry has arbitrarily decided is best.
Limitation 3: Restrictive Advice
People also generally spend more time looking at your internal facial features than your face’s perimeter.
So while sometimes matching your hair to your face shape works well (like for Emma Stone), it’s also helpful to consider your overall essence blend.
As one example, Selena Gomez doesn’t have a long face shape, but her high amount of Romantic and notable Natural enable her to pull off long waves:
Would these waves better suit Selena if they were bob-length? Maybe—a shorter cut might harmonize a little better with her short face shape.
But when we consider Selena’s overall beauty, she has so much glam Romantic, longer waves do suit her vibe—and so do shorter, bob-length Gamine cuts. She has a versatile essence blend!
Part 3: Finding Your Best Hair
Style analysis overcomes the major limitations of face shape advice by working with, rather than against, your natural beauty.
So here’s how to find your most flattering hair texture and length, from a style essences perspective.
How to Find your Best Hair Texture
Finding your best hair texture takes just two main steps:
Step 1: learn the most flattering hair for your individual style essences
Step 2: figure out which texture best suits you if you have more than one essence
For example, what should you do if you have both Romantic, which prefers long, curly hair, and Gamine, which prefers short, straight hair?
Typically you’ll want to choose one or the other: either full Romantic curls or straight, piecy Gamine layers.
This is because if you try to create a compromise between curly and straight hair, like wearing subtle, narrow waves, this texture may not flatter either Romantic or Gamine (since narrow waves tend to read as Ethereal).
So for texture, you want to focus on flattering primarily one of your essences. Your dominant essence is usually a good choice, but it can often work equally well to choose a texture that suits a non-dominant essence, and then bring in high amounts of your dominant essence in the rest of your styling.
Step 3 (optional): flatter two or more of your essences with your hair texture
Sometimes your hair texture can also flatter more than one essence.
For instance, Gamines are awesome in hair with some tousle. So if you’re a Romantic Gamine blend, you could add playful tousle to otherwise glam Romantic waves.
Similarly, if you’re a Romantic Natural blend, you could pair long shaggy layers (Natural) with full Romantic waves.
Another example is that if you have two essences that are flattered by a similar hair texture, you can sometimes get a really harmonious hairstyle by including elements of both.
For example, Romantic and Ethereal are both flattered by waves (fuller waves for Romantic; narrower, more elongated waves for Ethereal). So Romantic Ethereal blends can experiment with waves that are simultaneously full and notably elongated, like chunky mermaid waves.
How to Find Your Best Hair Length
For length, there’s less straightforward guidelines—you have options!
Here are methods to explore:
1) Match your hair length to your face length
For this method, you first find your style essences and then determine which essence is represented in your overall face shape.
So if you’re a Dramatic Classic Gamine, you’d determine whether your overall face appears long (Dramatic), moderate (Classic), or short (Gamine). Then you match your hair length to your face length.
(If you can’t decide whether your face is long or short, there’s a good chance it’s moderate! Another rule of thumb is that the average female face is about 7-7.5 inches in length.)
Above in Part 1, we already discussed how face shape is instructive for finding your best hair length—but also how as in the case of Selena Gomez, factors beyond face shape can determine the hair length that flatters us.
So another option is to:
2) Match your hair length to your dominant essence
Here are the lengths that generally flatter each essence:
Gamine: short—around bob-length and above
Classic: moderate—shoulder-length or a bit above or below
Ingenue: not extremely short or long—shoulder-length is a safe choice, but you can go a bit above or below as long as the effect isn’t extreme
Romantic: bust-length hair (give or take a few inches)—this length feels glamorous and sensuous
Dramatic, Natural, and Ethereal: long hair (though Dramatic can also do super short hair—Dramatic is flattered by extremes!)
What reads as “long” hair will differ based on your specific face, but a rule of thumb is that hair at least three or four inches past the shoulders starts to read as long
Another rule of thumb is that we (subconsciously) judge the length of a person’s hair relative to the length of their face. So if you want your hair to feel “long,” you can try making your total hair length more than double your face length. (E.g., if your face is 7 inches long, a haircut that’s 14+ inches, from root to tip, will tend to read as notably long on you)
3) Consider your overall percentage of essences
If your beauty is heavily composed of essences that favor long hair (e.g., around 75% of your essence blend or more is Ethereal, Dramatic, Natural, and/or Romantic), you may prefer yourself in long hair.
And if your essence blend consists of mostly Classic, Gamine, or Ingenue, you’ll likely find that your most flattering cut is around shoulder length or above.
But there are still exceptions to these general guidelines. For instance, let’s say you’re an Ethereal Natural Gamine, with only 20% Gamine. If your face shape is notably short (Gamine), you still might find that a shorter cut most flatters you, despite that overall your essences are elongated.
For hair length, there really isn’t one rule—it’s going to be specific to your individual face.
Your choice does get easier if you only have essences that prefer shorter hair—Classic, Gamine, and Ingenue—or longer—Ethereal, Dramatic, Natural, and Romantic.
EDNs like Blake Lively and Gisele Bündchen, and REDs like Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian, are known for their iconic flowing locks, which suit their elongated style essences (and glam Romantic) extremely well.
In contrast, if you’re a Classic Gamine, long hair is very likely going to overwhelm you. Style icon Audrey Tautou has a ton of Gamine and some Classic, and she’s amazing in a pixie and chin-length bobs—anything past the shoulders starts to look heavy on her. Blake-Livey-length hair wouldn’t harmonize nearly as well with Audrey’s compact facial structure.
4) Do what’s practical for you
Sometimes your best haircut is the one that suits your natural texture, your lifestyle, and other practical factors.
Style analysis advice is meant to be guidelines, not absolute rules—follow the guidelines that work for you, and adjust or disregard the ones that don’t! : )
5) What about bangs?
That topic deserves a separate post, but in general, the elongated essences are flattered by longer bangs, the shortened essences are flattered by shorter bangs, and Classics are flattered by moderate-length bangs!
Summary
Matching your hair length to your face shape (specifically to your face’s length) can be highly flattering.
But face shape advice also has notable limitations, like when it advises working against your natural beauty.
Ultimately, your best hair will reflect your style essences—it will match the shapes, lengths, and vibes already present in your face.
