High Cheekbones vs Wide Cheekbones: Why They Don't Look the Same

If people have described your cheekbones as high, prominent or wide, they may have been describing three different things.

"High cheekbones" is an everyday visual description, not a measurement. It usually refers to the way the front of the cheekbone catches the light, and to the shadow that sits beneath it. Facial width is different. It can be measured, and the standard measurement is taken at the sides of the face, near the ears, not at the rounded front of the cheekbone.

That is why the two do not always go together. A cheekbone can look prominent without necessarily making the face look wide. And a face can look wide even when the front of the cheekbone is not especially prominent.

What the eye finally reads also depends on the temples above the cheekbone, the soft tissue around it, the jaw beneath it and the length of the face. A face that looks wide at the cheekbones cannot be understood from the cheekbone alone.

What is the difference between high and wide cheekbones?

High cheekbones describe an appearance. Wide cheekbones, when the phrase is used precisely, describe a measurement.

Two parts of the cheekbone matter particularly here. Its body forms the rounded prominence at the top of the cheek, below the outer corner of the eye. From the body, a slender bar of bone runs back towards the ear and joins the temporal bone, forming the zygomatic arch along the side of the face.

The body projects forwards and outwards at an angle. The arch sits further back and contributes to how broad the face is at that level. Prominence at the front and width at the side do not have to go together.

"High" adds one more impression: where the cheekbone appears to sit on the face. That impression is shaped by light and shadow as well as by bone, an observation about how faces are seen rather than a measured finding. None of the studies reviewed for this article defines a high cheekbone by a single measurement.

What is bizygomatic width?

Bizygomatic width is the distance across the face between the two zygia, the outermost points of the zygomatic arches. It is the standard measurement of facial width at the cheekbones, and it underlies common ratios such as the facial index, which compares the height of the face with its width. Because it is taken at the arches, it describes the sides of the face rather than the front of the cheekbone. How it is used, and how photographs change it, is explained in Why Does My Face Look Wide?

Surgical studies show that the two can change independently. At a university hospital in Seoul, Baek and colleagues classified patients with prominent cheekbones as having a prominent arch alone, or a prominent body and arch. In patients whose cheekbone was cut and repositioned without removing bone, the width between the zygia fell by about 11 mm on average, while an oblique measurement towards the front of the cheekbone did not decrease. The study concerns surgical technique and is not cited here as a recommendation. What it shows is that width at the side and prominence towards the front are not the same measurement: in that group, one changed while the other did not.

The part of the cheekbone that looks prominent is not always the part that makes a face wide.

Why do cheekbones look different on different faces?

Because a cheekbone is never seen on its own. Its effect on the face depends on the structures around it, and each of them can change how the same bone reads.

Above the arch lies the temple. When the temple is full, the outline runs smoothly from the forehead past the cheekbone. When it is hollow, the arch can stand out as an edge, and the face can look broader at the cheekbones and narrower above them. That is clinical reasoning. The nearest evidence comes from photographs of 450 young Han Chinese women rated for attractiveness: higher-rated faces were narrower at the cheekbones and jaw but wider at the temples. The study measured attractiveness, not how prominent the cheekbones looked.

Around the cheekbone sits the soft tissue of the cheek, and it changes what the bone looks like. Part of the cheek's forward fullness comes from a deep layer of fat lying on the bone; in anatomical dissections, Rohrich and colleagues concluded that adding volume to it increases how far the cheek projects. Below the cheekbone, the hollow beneath it influences how much shadow separates the cheekbone from the lower face. The same bone can look sculpted over one cheek and soft over a fuller one, and as this tissue changes with age and weight, a cheekbone can look different over the years without the bone itself changing much. These points are clinical reasoning.

Beneath the cheekbones sits the jaw, and width at one level is read against width at the other. When Wu and colleagues digitally altered the jaw width in a photograph of one Taiwanese woman, leaving her cheekbones unchanged, whether 203 raters judged the face square depended on jaw width relative to cheekbone width. Broad arches over a narrow jaw and narrow arches over a broad jaw make different outlines, even when neither measurement is unusual.

Width is also judged against height. Because the facial index compares the two, the same width counts as broader on a shorter face. The chin, where the outline ends, affects how the face narrows below the cheekbones.

A cheekbone is read in the direction it projects, and against the face around it.

Can the jaw make a face look wide instead of the cheekbones?

Yes. A face described as having wide cheekbones may be widest somewhere else, or may look wide because of the relationship between levels rather than any single width. The widest point may be at the angles of the jaw, as Square Jaw in Asian Faces explains. The face may be short for its width. Full cheeks may widen the midface with no difference in the bone.

The relationship also works the other way. In a case series of more than a thousand masseter treatments in Asian patients, Kim and colleagues noted that thinning the masseter can make the cheekbones and the angles of the jaw look relatively more prominent. A narrower lower face can leave the cheekbones as the widest point by comparison. V-Shaped Face looks at the whole outline.

How are cheekbones assessed in Asian faces?

With attention to which population a finding comes from, because "Asian" covers faces that differ considerably from one another.

Le and colleagues measured the faces of 60 Chinese, 60 Vietnamese and 60 Thai young adults directly and compared them with 60 North American Caucasians. They reported significantly greater bizygomatic width in the Asian samples. These were small samples from three populations, and they describe averages, not individuals.

The Asian Facial Aesthetics Expert Consensus Group, a panel of 21 experts from 11 Asia-Pacific countries, drew on published studies and clinical experience in 2016. It described the Asian skull as wider at the temples, cheekbones and jaw than the Caucasian skull, and as less projected at the front, including at the lower rim of the eye socket and the central upper jaw. The panel noted that this description reflects characteristics of ethnic Koreans and Chinese, and its definition of Asian left out the Indian subcontinent. It is an expert consensus, not a measurement of Asian faces as a whole.

That description pairs more width at the side with less projection at the front: the two dimensions this article separates. In a face built that way, the cheekbone people notice may be the arch rather than the front of the cheekbone. That inference is clinical reasoning, and individual faces within every population vary widely.

The same panel's injectable guidance treats the front and the side as different questions. It reported that filler in Asian patients was placed mainly in the inner part of the cheek and rarely in the outer part, where it could widen an already wide midface, and that added forward projection of the inner cheek creates a visual narrowing effect. That is expert opinion drawn from practice, not a measured outcome.

For an individual face, assessment typically considers:

• Where the face is widest: at the temples, the arches, the cheekbones or the jaw
• How far the cheekbone projects forward compared with how far it extends to the side
• The temple above, the soft tissue of the cheek and the hollow below
• Width at the cheekbones relative to the jaw, the chin and the height of the face
• The face from the front, at an angle and in profile, at rest and in expression
• How the face has changed with time or weight

Several of these cannot be judged reliably in a mirror or a photograph. The arches sit close to the ears and can be hidden by hair, and forward projection is easier to judge at an angle or from the side.

Do wide cheekbones need treatment?

No. Wide cheekbones are not a medical problem. In many faces, in women and in men, they are part of the structure that gives the face its strength and character. Whether width at the cheekbones reads as broad, strong or balanced depends on the rest of the face.

Where a change is wanted, the source of the width comes first. Injectable treatments do not narrow bone, and, as the consensus guidance above suggests, where filler is placed can decide whether it adds forward projection or width. Width at the arches is skeletal, and reducing it is a question for a surgeon. When the impression comes from a hollow temple, a deep shadow below the cheekbone, a short face or a recently narrowed jaw, the cheekbone may not be where the answer lies.

The Asian Facial Architecture™ perspective

Asian Facial Architecture™, Dr. Gan Lee Ping's framework for reading each face against its own structure, assesses a cheekbone in three steps:

• Direction: does it project forward, to the side, or both?
• Surroundings: how do the temple, the cheek and the jaw shape the way it reads?
• Proportion: how does width at the cheekbones relate to the height of the face and the width of the lower face?

Only then does the question of change arise. These steps organise a clinical assessment; they are not a validated scientific classification.

Heard this way, "my cheekbones make my face look wide" is the beginning of a question rather than a diagnosis. It may describe prominent arches, a prominent front of the cheekbone seen at an angle, a hollow temple, a narrow jaw beneath, full cheeks, or a face already in proportion. Each points to a different decision, and one of them is to leave the cheekbones exactly as they are.

Before considering cheekbone reduction

If facial width can arise from several different relationships, the width itself does not reveal which one is responsible. That is what an individual assessment is for.

In consultation in Singapore, Dr. Gan Lee Ping assesses the cheekbone as one part of the facial architecture: from the front, at an angle and in profile, at rest and in expression, with the bone examined directly. The aim is to establish whether the cheekbone projects mainly forward or to the side, how the temples, cheeks and jaw shape the way it reads, and whether the widest point is at the cheekbones at all.

That can lead to one precise non-surgical change, to referral to a surgeon where the question is the bone itself, or to the conclusion that the cheekbones are part of what makes the face balanced.