Norwood Scale Test: What Norwood Am I?

The test runs two models 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 of the photo 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.

Two numbers come out of it, both measured in middle thirds, so the size of your face and of the photo do not change them. Forehead height is the distance from the glabella up to the hairline at the middle of your forehead; the classical facial canon has it equal to the middle third, 1.00. Temple recession is how much higher your hairline sits at the temples than in the middle: the depth of the M. A straight or rounded hairline reads zero or below.

The stage follows from both. Temple recession of 0.12 or more, or a forehead of 1.00 or more, reads stage 2. Temple recession of 0.22 or more, or a forehead of 1.12 or more (a front receded evenly across, Norwood’s A pattern), reads stage 3. A forehead of 1.35 or more, or stage 3 temples with a forehead of 1.00 or more, reads 4 or beyond.

Those cut-offs were set on real faces. We ran 796 photos of public figures through the same two models: 680 had a face the landmark model found, and 318 of those had a hairline the test could read, 166 of them men. We staged 142 of the readable men by eye with the traced hairline drawn on, then chose the cut-offs that matched those calls best: 115 got the same stage, 26 were one stage apart and 1 was two apart, a naturally tall forehead read as stage 3. Where the test and our eyes disagreed, it read a stage lower about twice as often as higher, because fine, thin hair at the front still counts as hair to the segmentation model.

Each stage as Norwood described it, and what a front photo can show of it. The drawings view the head from above, face toward the top: shaded is hair, white is bare scalp.

Norwood also described an A variant at stages 2 to 5, where the whole front recedes evenly with no M. A community sample of men aged 18 to 49 found 12% with this frontal pattern (Rhodes et al., Dermatologic Surgery, 1998). The test reads it from forehead height, which is why a high hairline with no M can still read stage 3.

Norwood drew the line between stage 2 and stage 3 by depth. Stage 2 recession is small and stays at least 2 cm in front of a line over the top of the head between the ear canals; stage 3 recession is deep, and the temples are bare or close to it. A front photo cannot measure a line over the top of the head, so the test uses the depth of the M instead: temple recession under 0.22 middle thirds reads stage 2 or less, 0.22 and over reads stage 3.

In practice: if your temples recede in two clear triangles while the middle of your hairline stays low, the depth of the triangles decides between 2 and 3. If your whole hairline sits high with no M, forehead height decides: 1.00 to 1.11 reads stage 2, 1.12 and over stage 3. The middle half of men in our reference photos read 0.81 to 1.01 for forehead height and -0.01 to +0.08 for temple recession.

A mature hairline is Norwood stage 2: the teenage hairline moves back a little at the temples in early adulthood and then holds. A receding hairline keeps moving, from stage 2 to stage 3 and on. One photo shows where your hairline is, not whether it is moving, so the reliable test is time: take the photo the same way every few months, or run an old photo through the test, and compare the readings.

On a single reading, depth separates them. A mature hairline reads temple recession under 0.22 and a forehead under 1.12, stage 2 at most. Deeper triangles, or a front that has gone back across, read stage 3, the stage Norwood counted as balding. Finer, shorter hairs along the front edge are another sign of an active recession; a photo at this size does not resolve single hairs, so the test does not read them.

If you are styling around your hairline, the hairstyle finder matches cuts to your face shape and the hair parting finder picks where to part.

Stage 3 or higher is balding by Norwood’s definition, and it is common. In a community sample of men aged 18 to 49, 42% were at stage 3 or higher: 16% of men aged 18 to 29 and 53% of men aged 40 to 49 (Rhodes et al., Dermatologic Surgery, 1998).

A front photo misses the crown. Hair loss that starts at the crown, stage 3 vertex, can be well along while the front still reads stage 1 or 2, so a young-looking front is not the whole answer if your crown looks thin from above. Shedding, a widening part and thinning hairs are also outside what this test measures. A dermatologist can examine the scalp itself, crown included, and tell male pattern hair loss from other causes of hair loss.

In one photo a big forehead and a receded hairline look the same: both read as a tall forehead. The test measures it against your own middle third, so the size of your face and of the photo do not change it. The middle half of men read 0.81 to 1.01 middle thirds; 1.00 to 1.11 reads stage 2, and 1.12 or more with no M reads stage 3, the A pattern.

Your history tells them apart. A high hairline you have always had, with even edges and no M at the temples, is the shape of your forehead. A hairline that used to sit lower, or temples that keep going back, is recession: compare with a photo from a few years ago. For the rest of your face, the face shape detector measures length against width, and the facial thirds tool compares the thirds of your face.

The hairline test takes under a minute and needs one clear photo from the front. The photo is read in your browser and is never uploaded.

When the test cannot read your hairline it says why (a fringe, a turned head, a hat, a shaved head) instead of guessing. On our reference photos, the most common reasons were a turned head and hair falling across the forehead.

The Norwood scale describes male pattern hair loss. In women, pattern hair loss usually keeps the front hairline and thins across the top of the head along the part, which Erich Ludwig graded in three stages in 1977 (British Journal of Dermatology). A front photo with the hair pushed back cannot see that thinning, so this test gives no Ludwig stage. Its two measurements still describe a woman’s hairline, and a high, even hairline can also come from hair pulled tight for years (traction alopecia).