What makes a female face beautiful?

As aesthetic clinicians, we must understand what makes a ‘beautiful’ face and why it is important. If a face is deemed more attractive, there will be many hidden benefits for the individual, they will communicate their fitness and attractiveness which will naturally make others want to collaborate with them.

In this blog, Dr Tim Pearce will explore what makes a face attractive and how you can give your patients beautiful faces with the right treatments. We will look at why framing the eyes matters, what makes a beautiful female jawline, facial symmetry, and how sexual dimorphism plays a key part in beauty.

What are the components of a beautiful face?

The human face has many different components that must be understood separately if we want to impart ‘control’ over them through aesthetic medical intervention.

Healthy skin

We can start by considering the skin – the complexion. Beautiful skin is about skin health. Healthy skin is characterised as reflective, luminescent skin that shows a rich blood flow with minimal distractions, producing a smooth, clear canvas that allows the other facial features to stand out appropriately.

Once you have a canvas, you can look at the details of the face. Think of it in terms of harmony, proportion, and ratios. However, there is an underlying component that is often missed when considering what makes up a healthy-looking face. Every part of the face can be broken down into projecting points, defining lines, and connecting planes.

Framing the eyes

Take, for example, the cheek. For a beautiful cheek, it is vital it has an angle underneath the eye that creates a surface to reflect light upwards towards the eyes. Arguably, you can define the whole face – including the shadows created by the cheeks and jawline – as a structure that presents the eyes to the world.

Humans connect with their eyes, eye contact is key to our interactions, and therefore, a lot of what makes a face beautiful is how it allows the eyes to dominate the face by carefully framing them with the eyebrows and highlighting them from beneath with catch lights developed by projecting the cheeks.

The jawline

In the lower face, the jawline is defined by the angular changes at the chin and gonial angle and the connecting line that makes them part of one structure. If you create those key elements in a drawing or sculpture, it should be recognisable as a jawline. To improve upon it, and make it more beautiful, we must understand the ratios and how these structures fit together differently for men and women.

With a female, for example, if the midface is well constructed – with a cheek that projects outwards and ends at the right point in relationship to the oral commissure and blends in gently to the underside of the eye, we can then start to relate it to the jawline to see a female face. At this point, we must understand how sexual dimorphism – the difference between male and female faces – becomes a key part of beauty.

Read up on male versus female jawline filler injection points, creating a defined female jawline with fillers without masculinising and jawline injection points, anatomy, and safety tips.

What are the signals for attractiveness in faces?

To understand attractiveness in others, we must acknowledge that we are discussing sexuality.

The characteristics that cause someone to be attracted to another person are linked to survival. We choose our friends and sexual partners according to attractiveness because we are looking for traits that we believe will make us more likely to survive if we ‘hang around’ with certain people. This predisposes us to look for signals associated with health, attitude, approachability, friendliness, and the ability to collaborate and connect. We may also seek protection from them and such attributes might attract us to an individual.

Oestrous cycle

When reflecting on female attractiveness, we also tend to seek signals of fertility – of course, you do not have to be fertile to be attractive. One of the visible features associated with fertility is what happens to the skin during the oestrous cycle.

If you are a fertile female, you will have different blood flow levels at different times within the oestrous cycle, oestrogen can also cause the skin to retain more water producing additional volume and skin luminescence due to added moisture in the skin.

Hormones

Hormones are intimately associated with strong signals of sexual dimorphism. In men, having large hair follicles that produce a beard is associated with high testosterone levels, whereas having clear skin with very tiny hair follicles is associated with high oestrogen levels in women.

Fat distribution

Fat distribution also differs in humans between the sexes. Fuller, larger cheeks are more common in females due to higher levels of oestrogen. This extra fat distribution is one of the signals of female fertility and tends to be considered attractive. Men of a similar weight will have smaller fat pads which will signal that they are more masculine and are higher in testosterone.

Bony angles and proportions

As previously mentioned, every face is made up of projecting points, defining lines, and connecting planes, and these defining points and their size differentiate male and female faces.

A male will have strong defining points in the lower face – the chin angle, the gonial angle, and the width or defining line of the jaw are all larger than in females. Conversely, females have a relatively smaller, softer, or more petitely-shaped jaw. Rather than having two pronounced angles and a wide chin as we see in men, they have a narrower chin that curves into a single point, with a gentler jawline curve or narrower gonial angle relative to the cheeks, which tend to be fuller and more laterally projected compared with the jawline. These differences are instantly noticeable to humans to differentiate male or female faces and determine attractiveness.

Symmetry

Many believe symmetry is a key measure of beauty, but this is not always the case.

For example, if a patient has relatively ill-defined features or disproportionate features, that are not wholly male or female or are generally unclear as a facial feature then attempting to achieve symmetry will not necessarily improve the beauty of the face.

Symmetry is therefore only a small part of beauty, and is limited, because too much symmetry – splitting the face down the middle and creating a mirror image of one side to the other, for example – can look unnatural.

Similarly, many famous people are considered to have above-average beauty, but they have small asymmetries, the characteristics of which define and make their beauty, because they are atypical. For example, they may have very average proportions except for a strong chin or asymmetrical eyebrow.

Emotions

The beauty of the face is also linked to emotional expression.

Sadly, the signs of ageing also correlate with looking less happy. There is a descent in the cheek, eyebrows and corner of the mouth, an increase in nasolabial folds, the rotation of the chin upwards, the formation of a mental crease and frown lines, and loss of lip volume.

All these changes are associated with looking unhappy or cross and are a core reason patients seek aesthetic treatment. They do not necessarily want to look younger but do not recognise the emotional response of the person they see in the mirror who appears outwardly sad when they do not feel like that on the inside.

When treating patients, we must consider the emotional expression we create from the treatment delivered and how their face makes us feel when we look at it, aiming for a positive to a neutral expression. Be mindful not to go overboard with positivity which can look less attractive and fake; for example, too much dermal filler in the oral commissure can make a patient smile inappropriately – the Joker look – which appears less genuine to others.

Many facial restoration treatments can create a positive aura without making an individual smile. When patients smile, their cheek rises and they get a catch light under their eye, making them appear happy. If you lose volume in the anterior cheek, the area alongside the nose becomes straight creating a shadow instead of a catch light, resulting in a subtle sense of sadness or unhappiness to the appearance. Therefore, cheek volume can make someone look happier. But similarly, supporting the oral commissure, revolumising a lip, or supporting an eyebrow can all make a patient look happier and more alert, even if their primary goal is to look fresher, younger, or get rid of a wrinkle.

Get more insight from Dr Tim with the top aesthetic treatments to make your patients look younger.

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