Face shape is the outline of your face, determined by comparing four measurements: forehead width, cheekbone width, jaw width, and face length. The relationships between these — not any single number — sort every face into one of seven categories: oval, round, square, heart, diamond, oblong, or triangle.

This is the most established of all eight features. Stylists and opticians have used the same seven-category system for decades, and it has the strongest evidence behind it for two specific decisions: which glasses frames suit you, and where to put volume in a haircut. It’s worth knowing that a meaningful share of people — probably a fifth to a third — sit right on the boundary between two adjacent shapes rather than fitting neatly into one.

Eye shape looks at three things independently: whether your crease is visible when your eyes are open, which direction your outer corner points, and how much white space (sclera) shows around your iris. Combine those and you get the commonly used core set — almond, round, hooded, monolid, upturned, and downturned — plus four more specific descriptors some sources add on top: deep-set, protruding, close-set, and wide-set.

Almond is often called the “default” or most versatile shape, mostly because it’s the visual middle ground the other shapes are described relative to. Most real eyes are a blend rather than a pure single type — round eyes with a slight downturn, for instance, are completely normal. Eye shape mainly matters for one thing: eyeliner and eyeshadow placement, where getting the shape right changes the technique significantly.

This is the one feature on this list that doesn’t sort you into a type — it gives you a score instead. Symmetry analysis draws an imaginary vertical line down the center of your face and measures how closely the left and right sides mirror each other across your eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and jaw.

Here’s something worth knowing before you take the number too seriously: nobody’s face is perfectly symmetrical, and it isn’t supposed to be. Genuinely mirror-image faces actually look slightly uncanny in photos — a bit of natural asymmetry is completely normal and part of what makes a face read as real rather than artificial. A symmetry score is best treated as a fun data point, not a verdict on anything.

Color analysis sorts your natural coloring — skin, hair, and eyes together — into a “season.” The classic version uses four: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. More detailed systems split each of those into three further sub-types, giving twelve seasons total, for people who want a more precise palette than the basic four allow.

This is different from skin tone analysis, even though people mix the two up constantly. Skin tone looks at your undertone alone. Color analysis looks at the combined effect of your skin, hair, and eye color together, and the output is a palette of flattering clothing and makeup colors rather than a single undertone label. If you’ve ever noticed that some colors just make you look tired while others make you look awake, this is the system explaining why.

Nose shape is classified from a side profile, using three things: whether the bridge is straight, curved, or dips inward; whether the tip points up, down, or stays level; and how wide the base is relative to your eyes. That gives named categories like Greek (straight bridge), Roman or aquiline (curved bridge), button and snub (short, upturned), and Nubian (wider base, rounded tip), among others.

It’s worth being upfront that these are descriptive labels, not strict medical categories, and most real noses blend features from more than one type rather than matching one perfectly. Nose shape also varies more by individual and ancestry than most other features on this list — there’s no single “ideal” shape, just different common patterns.

Lip shape compares the size of your top lip to your bottom lip, and the overall width and fullness of both. That produces seven common categories: full, thin, wide, heart-shaped (a defined cupid’s bow), round, top-heavy, and bottom-heavy.

This is the feature with the most direct, practical payoff of the eight — lip shape genuinely changes which lipstick and liner techniques work best. A top-heavy lip and a bottom-heavy lip need opposite liner strategies to look balanced, for example, so knowing which one you have turns a five-minute guessing game into a quick, confident routine.

Forehead shape is a little different from the others on this list, and it’s worth being straightforward about that. Unlike face shape or eye shape, there’s no single, widely agreed set of forehead categories — most guides describe foreheads with informal terms instead, like round, straight, curved, or M-shaped (a forehead with a slight peak at the hairline, sometimes called a widow’s peak).

In practice, forehead shape works best as a supporting detail rather than a standalone analysis — it’s one of the four measurements that already feeds into your face shape result, and it’s most useful when you’re deciding how to style bangs or a fringe. If you’re curious about your forehead specifically, your face shape result already captures the information that matters most.

Skin tone analysis is about undertone — the subtle color beneath your skin’s surface — not how light or dark your skin is. There are four commonly used categories: warm (yellow or golden undertone), cool (pink or blue undertone), neutral (an even mix of both), and olive (a distinct green or grayish cast that can lean warm, cool, or neutral depending on the person).

A few quick, low-tech ways people check this at home: looking at whether your wrist veins appear more blue-purple (cool) or green (warm), and noticing whether gold or silver jewelry looks more flattering against your skin. Undertone is the single biggest factor in whether a foundation shade matches or looks slightly off, which is why it matters more for makeup shopping than almost anything else on this list.