Hairline Test: Mature or Receding, and Your Hairline Type

Two models run in your browser. A face landmark model finds 478 points on your face, which give your brow line and your middle third: the height from between your brows (the glabella) to the base of your nose. A segmentation model marks every pixel as hair, skin, background or clothing. The test then walks straight up your forehead from just above the brows in 47 columns, from beyond one outer eye corner to beyond the other, and records where hair starts in each. That line is your traced hairline, drawn on your photo.

Everything is measured in middle thirds, so a close selfie and a photo from across the room read the same. Forehead height is the distance from the glabella up to the hairline at the middle of your forehead. Temple recession is how much higher your hairline sits at the temples than in the middle. The hairline type comes from the shape of the whole traced line.

We tested it on 795 photos of public figures. 679 had a face the landmark model found, and 317 of those had a hairline the test could read. The rest it turned down with a reason instead of guessing: a turned head (190), hair across the forehead (81), a fringe (47), a hat or headband (15), a shaved or bald scalp (13), a tilted head (12), hair and skin that did not separate (3) and a cropped head (1).

A mature hairline moves back a little in early adulthood, mostly at the temples, and then holds. A receding hairline keeps moving. The test places your hairline on the Norwood scale with the same cut-offs as our Norwood scale test, from your temple recession and your forehead height, whichever reaches further:

The middle half of the 166 men in our reference photos read a forehead of 0.81 to 1.01 middle thirds and temples of -0.01 to +0.08. Hair clinics often describe a mature hairline as sitting about one finger width above the highest forehead crease. Jeff Donovan, a board-certified dermatologist who treats only hair loss, puts normal maturation at about one finger breadth, and about two at the temples, with more suggesting pattern hair loss. That is a rule of thumb, not a published measurement, and it needs the crease that shows when you raise your brows, so the test uses Norwood’s depth instead.

One photo shows where your hairline is, not whether it is moving. The reliable test is time: take the same photo every few months, or run a photo from a few years ago, and compare the readings.

Hairline studies sort front hairlines into a handful of shapes: rectangular or straight, round, M-shaped, bell-shaped and triangular, with the widow’s peak recorded on its own (Sirinturk et al., Surgical and Radiologic Anatomy, 2017; Kashiyama et al., Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, 2021). Those studies sorted by eye. The test names six types from the traced line, each with a measured cut-off in middle thirds, checked in this order:

An M-shaped hairline can also have a widow’s peak, and the result says so. On 202 reference photos we could judge by eye, sorted blind to the numbers, the test named the same type for 130 (64%). Most disagreements were straight against rounded, which is a matter of degree.

In our reference photos, men read 63% straight, 14% M-shaped, 14% rounded, 4% widow’s peak, 4% uneven and 1% bell-shaped; women read 45% rounded, 30% straight, 12% bell-shaped, 9% uneven, 2% widow’s peak and 1% M-shaped. Studies that sort by eye in person find more M-shaped men: 42.6% of 122 Japanese men (Kashiyama, 2021) and 46% of young Turkish men (Sirinturk, 2017). Two things explain the gap. A mild M below 0.10 reads straight here, and many of the women in our photos wore their hair down over the temples, which reads rounded or bell-shaped: 12 of the 19 bell-shaped readings were hair worn down. Push your hair back or tie it for a true reading.

For cuts that suit your hairline and face, the hairstyle finder matches styles to your face shape, and the hair parting finder picks the side to part on.

A widow’s peak is a V-shaped point at the middle of the hairline. Studies report very different shares: 81% of 360 women measured at a hair salon had one (Nusbaum and Fuentefria, Dermatologic Surgery, 2009), against 32.8% of men and 29.6% of women in a Japanese study (Kashiyama, 2021).

This test finds the peaks deep enough to trace in a photo: 0.04 middle thirds or more. It found one in 9% of the men and 2% of the women in our reference photos. Of the 19 photos at that cut-off, 14 showed a clear peak by eye; the other 5 were a strand or a gap at a part, curls, or a bald or shaved head. A small peak below the cut-off reads as the hairline around it.

Textbooks often call the widow’s peak a single dominant gene. Biologist John McDonald of the University of Delaware looked for the evidence and found no study showing that (Myths of Human Genetics). A widow’s peak is also not a sign of hair loss: it is a shape, and a receding hairline is a change.

By Norwood’s definition you are balding from stage 3, which this test reads at temple recession of 0.22 or a forehead of 1.12. It is common: in a community sample of men aged 18 to 49, 42% were at stage 3 or higher, from 16% of men aged 18 to 29 to 53% of men aged 40 to 49 (Rhodes et al., Dermatologic Surgery, 1998). Of the 166 men in our reference photos, 21 read stage 3 or beyond from the front.

A front photo misses the crown. Hair loss that starts at the crown can be well along while the front still reads not receding, so if your crown looks thin from above, that matters more than this reading. Shedding, a widening part and finer hairs at the front edge are also outside what a photo at this size can measure. A dermatologist can examine the scalp, crown included, and tell pattern hair loss from other causes. The Norwood scale test shows the full stage chart.

The test measures your forehead from the glabella, between your brows, up to the middle of your hairline, and divides it by your middle third, from the glabella to the base of your nose. The classical canon of proportions has the thirds equal, a forehead of 1.00. Real foreheads mostly sit a little lower: the middle half of men in our reference photos read 0.81 to 1.01, and of women 0.84 to 0.98. In centimeters, one study of 360 women measured 5.5 cm on average from mid-eyebrow to the middle of the hairline (Nusbaum and Fuentefria, 2009).

A high reading and a receded hairline look the same in one photo. Your history tells them apart: a high hairline you have always had, with even edges and no M, is the shape of your forehead. Finger widths, the usual way forums measure foreheads, vary from hand to hand, which is why the test uses your own middle third instead. The facial thirds tool compares all three thirds of your face, and the face shape detector reads its overall shape.

The hairline type and forehead height describe a woman’s hairline as well as a man’s, and the result card switches to the ranges measured on the 137 women in our reference photos. The Norwood stage does not apply: it describes men’s hairlines. In women, pattern hair loss usually keeps the front hairline and thins across the top along the part, which Erich Ludwig graded in 1977 (British Journal of Dermatology), and a front photo with the hair pushed back cannot see it. A hairline that has moved back can have other causes too, such as hair pulled tight for years (traction alopecia), which a dermatologist can tell apart.

One clear photo from the front is all it needs. It is read in your browser and never uploaded.

When the test cannot read your hairline it says why: a fringe, hair across the forehead, a turned or tilted head, a hat or a shaved scalp. Fix that one thing and take the photo again.