"I just want my face to look a little slimmer."
It comes up in almost every facial contouring consultation. But the sentence splits two ways. Whether the face feels that way because it is wide side to side or because it is long top to bottom decides where the work happens. Softening the jawline (the mandibular angle) and shortening the chin are two different procedures.
So we applied both, one after the other, to the same face.
Two steps
- V-line: smooth only the mandibular angle (the side of the jaw)
- + Chin length: shorten a chin that runs long
Original
Original — Before the procedure.
Step 1 V-line — Only the jawline was smoothed.
Step 2 + Chin — The chin length was reduced as well.
They change different places
We measured each step in millimeters. Jaw width runs between the two mandibular angles, lower-face length runs from the base of the nose to the chin tip, and the iris diameter (11.7mm) served as the scale reference.
| Step | Jaw width | Lower-face length | Face width |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. V-line | −1.4mm | +0.1 | −0.2 |
| 2. + Chin | −1.2mm | −1.4mm | −0.4 |
Step 1 mostly moved the width; step 2 mostly moved the length. Both get called "jaw reduction," but the measurements that change are not the same.
Here is where those measurements sit on the face.
Original
Original — Jaw width 99.9mm, face width 134.4mm.
1. V-line — Jaw width −1.4mm. The length stays put.
2. + Chin — Lower-face length −1.4mm. In exchange, the jaw-width reduction shrank to −1.2mm.
Done together, they partly cancel each other out
In step 2, the jaw-width reduction shrank from −1.4 to −1.2.
Shortening the chin changes the shape of the lower jaw, and some of the width lost at the jaw-angle step appears to have come back. The per-area procedures did not move fully independently. Simply adding up the individual numbers can miss the actual result.
Stacking procedures did not stack the differences one to one.
So first, is it width or length?
Faces read as large for different reasons.
- A face that looks large because it is wide: that points to the mandibular angle (V-line)
- A face that looks large because it is long: that points to the chin length
If width is the concern and you shorten the length instead, the face gets shorter and can end up looking relatively wider. The reverse holds too.