ARE you a sucker for a chiselled jawline?
Scientists have come up with a formula to explain what makes a sharp jaw so very attractive.
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Two Belgian studies analysed the faces of the some of the chinniest celebs, from Angelina Jolie and Kate Moss, to Chris Hemsworth and Ben Affleck.
Lead by Prof Maurice Y. Mommaerts, from the European Face Centre at the University Hospital Brussels, the research sought to determine the ‘ideal’ male and female jaw shapes.
Turns out, whether an jawline is ‘attractive’ hinges on the angle it meets the face at (what’s known as the gonial angle).
A strong, chiselled jawline is considered by some to be a marker of masculinity.
But a number of male and female celebrities have reportedly gone under the knife to carve out their jaw and cheekbones in recent years, in a procedure called buccal fat removal.
It’s rumoured that the likes of Chrissy Teigen, Bella Hadid and Liam Payne have had the procedure.
According to Prof Mommaerts, the emergence of new beauty standards on social media has made a generation of users more open to cosmetic procedures.
He also attributed the flurry of pandemic-era video calls – the so-called ‘Zoom Boom’ – to an increased interest in aesthetic facial treatments.
Prof Mommaerts set up two online surveys to pinpoint the ideal male and female jaw angles, for surgeons to refer to when creating jaw implants.
Both used black and white pictures of celebrities and regular people, with their eyes covered in an effort to anonymise them and reduce bias.
For the survey of female jaws, the study authors shared 88 pictures of non-celebrities and stars including Angelina Jolie, Kate Moss, Irina Shayk, Kendall Jenner, Margot Robbie, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Cara Delevingne, Gigi Hadid and Doutzen Kroes.
The 46 participants were asked six questions about different aspects of the women’s jawlines, including their gonial angle from the front and in profile, the position of their jaw in relation to their mouth, and the ratio between their jaw and cheekbones.
They were also asked to rate the women in terms of attractiveness.
The study authors only selected white women and they also only showed pictures of the female celebrities from “their young adult years”.
Though pictures were anonymised, it was still possible to identify a few of the celebs pictured.
An image of supermodel Kate Moss was considered attractive by 76 per cent of participants.
According to the researchers, her gonial angle from the front was 139°.
Meanwhile, 100 per cent of participants deemed model Gigi Hadid’s jaw angle attractive, as it was “neither too steep nor too flat”. The angle measured 141.9°.
By contrast, 98 per cent of participants rated an anonymous woman with a much squarer jawline as less attractive.
Eighty-two per cent of participants also rated model Doutzen Kroes highly pleasing to the eye, as her jaw had “a pleasing vertical position” in line with her lips.
As for the review of male jawlines, participants were shown an anonymised mixture of celebrities and non-celebrities, including Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, Liam Hemsworth, Matthew Bomer, Michael Fassbinder, Johny Depp and Tom Hiddleston.
Almost half of the 81 participants were facial surgeons.
They were asked to judge the width of the jaw of the men pictured, the steepness of the jaw from a front-on angle, how high up on the face the jaw was, the face profile view, and the steepness of the jaw from the side on angle.
“We found clear indications of the preferred characteristics of a male jaw angle,” the authors said.
A 130° gonial angle was judged to be most attractive.
The jaw being a similar width to the rest of the face was also deemed more alluring.
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