Glossary: the terms behind the face, explained

Bone smashing is the practice of striking your own facial bones — with a hammer, a bottle or a fist — in the belief that they will heal wider or sharper. LOOKSMAXBRO does not do this and never will: repeated blows to a face produce fractures, nerve damage, infection and asymmetry, not a new jaw, and no research anywhere supports the idea. Nothing in the app or on this site applies force to a bone.

The buccal fat pad is a ball of fat sitting between the chewing muscles in the hollow of the cheek, below the cheekbone. Its size is mostly genetic, it does not shrink with face exercises or massage, and removing it is surgery — which is out of scope for LOOKSMAXBRO.

Canthal tilt is the angle of the line drawn between the inner and outer corner of an eye, measured against level. The LOOKSMAXBRO canthal tilt test reads it from one front photo after rotating the picture until the eyes are level, so the tilt of the camera cannot be mistaken for the tilt of the eye. It is a description of an angle, never a grade.

“Chad” is forum slang for a man imagined at the top of an attractiveness ranking, used as the far end of a scale LOOKSMAXBRO does not recognize. It is a comparison between people, and no number in this app or on this site sorts people against each other.

Forum slang — not a measurement LOOKSMAXBRO uses.

The cheekbones are the pair of bones under the eyes whose outer arm, the zygomatic arch, sets the width of the mid-face. They are bone and training does not reshape them; what changes how defined they read is the fat and fluid lying over them, which is why body-fat level is the strongest-graded lever LOOKSMAXBRO has for the cheeks.

Chewing gum, including the hard mastic kind, is the low-tech version of a jaw exerciser: it loads the masseter for as long as you keep chewing. The LOOKSMAXBRO catalog grades gum and jaw trainers nothing at all — the muscle work is real, the reshaped bone is not — and hours of daily chewing is a well-worn route to jaw pain.

A chin tuck is drawing the chin straight back over the neck without tipping the head, holding for a moment, then releasing. It is the core drill for a forward head, it trains the deep neck flexors, and it is one of the moves behind the moderate grade posture work carries in the LOOKSMAXBRO catalog.

A cleanser is the wash that takes oil, sweat and sunscreen off skin without stripping it. In the LOOKSMAXBRO morning routine it is step one of three — cleanse, moisturize, sunscreen — and gentle is the entire point, because grit and scrubbing damage the barrier the routine exists to protect.

A cold rinse is a splash or short run of cold water over the face in the morning. It narrows vessels and shifts a little of the fluid the pillow left behind, which is a real but short-lived effect — LOOKSMAXBRO treats it as part of waking up rather than as a treatment for anything.

The craniovertebral angle is the angle between horizontal and the line running from the C7 vertebra at the base of the neck up to the ear — the standard measure of how far forward a head sits. A photograph contains no C7, so the LOOKSMAXBRO posture check substitutes the shoulder and reports an estimate; roughly 50 degrees and up is the usual upright range.

Dark circles are the shadowed look under the eyes, produced by some mix of thin skin over the blood vessels beneath it, pigment in the skin itself, and the shadow a hollow tear trough casts. Which of the three you have decides what helps: sleep and salt move the swollen kind, sun protection works on the pigment kind, and a shadow thrown by bone responds to neither.

A day plan is the short list of habits LOOKSMAXBRO puts on the Home screen for today, drawn from a catalog where every habit carries its own evidence grade. It is deliberately short: a plan you finish on a Tuesday beats a plan you admire on a Sunday.

The dead bug is a floor drill in which you lie on your back and lower one arm and the opposite leg while keeping the lower back flat against the ground. It is trunk work, and trunk work is the half of posture training that lets the ribcage stay stacked once you have stopped thinking about it.

The deep neck flexors are the small muscles at the front of the cervical spine that hold the head back over the shoulders. They are what a chin tuck trains, and weak ones are the usual companion of a head that has drifted forward over a desk.

An evidence grade is the letter the LOOKSMAXBRO habit catalog attaches to every habit for how much research stands behind it, printed on this site as strong, moderate or weak. A habit with nothing behind it gets no grade and no chip at all rather than a flattering one — mewing and nose breathing are the two you will meet most often.

Face exercises are repeated contractions of the muscles of the face and jaw, done for tone. The LOOKSMAXBRO catalog grades them weak — the evidence is thin and made of small, short studies — so the app keeps the lesson and makes no claim about a changed face shape.

Face fat is the layer of fat between skin and muscle across the cheeks, the jaw and under the chin. It rises and falls with overall body fat rather than with anything applied to the face: LOOKSMAXBRO grades body-fat level strong for the cheeks and gives face “fat burners” no grade at all, because losing fat from one chosen region is not a thing bodies do.

Face Landmarker is the model the free tools on this site use to find 478 points on a face in a photo. It is downloaded from this site once per visit and runs inside your browser tab, so the photo is measured where it already is and never uploaded — the page has nowhere to send it.

Face pulling is dragging on the eyelid, the eye corner or the temple with fingers or tape to try to change the tilt or shape of an eye. This site marks eyelid pulling harmful and LOOKSMAXBRO does not include it anywhere: the tissue there is thin, it stretches rather than repositions, and an eye is not a thing to practice on.

Face shape is the name given to how four widths sit against each other — face length, forehead, cheekbones and jaw — usually sorted into seven categories such as oval, round, square and heart. The LOOKSMAXBRO face shape test measures all four from one photo and names the closest; no shape scores higher than another, and a different photo can move the answer to a neighboring shape.

Facial symmetry is how closely the two halves of a face mirror each other across a midline. The LOOKSMAXBRO face symmetry test reports it out of 100 by folding one side of the landmark set onto the other and measuring the gap; every real face is a little asymmetric, and a single photo’s lighting, lens and head turn move the number as much as the face does.

Forward head posture is what it looks like when the ear sits ahead of the shoulder instead of over it — the shape a day spent looking down at a screen leaves behind. The LOOKSMAXBRO posture check estimates it from one side photo as the angle from shoulder to ear, and the catalog grades the work that addresses it moderate: chin tucks, wall holds, shoulder-blade work and a raised screen, not a brace.

FWHR, the facial width-to-height ratio, is cheekbone width divided by the height from the brow to the upper lip. It is a research measurement with a long and much-argued literature attached to it, and LOOKSMAXBRO does not treat it as a rating of anybody: the app measures a face against its own earlier scans, not against a ratio.

A glute bridge is lying on your back with the knees bent and lifting the hips until the body is straight from shoulder to knee. It is hip work rather than face work, and it earns its place in a posture routine because a pelvis sitting neutral is what lets the ribs and the head stack above it.

The gonial angle is the angle at the corner of the lower jaw, where the vertical branch below the ear meets the horizontal body of the jawbone. A smaller angle reads as a squarer jaw; it is a bone measurement properly taken from an X-ray, so any figure read off a photo is an estimate of it.

Gua sha is the same slow drainage stroke as a hand massage, performed with a flat stone. LOOKSMAXBRO grades the stone nothing at all: the direction and the light pressure are what move fluid, and hands manage both without dragging on dry skin.

Hardmaxxing is the forum word for the permanent, medical end of looksmaxxing — surgery, implants, injectables, jaw operations. LOOKSMAXBRO does not do it and does not advise on it: everything in the app is a habit you can stop tomorrow, and anything surgical is a conversation with a qualified doctor rather than with an app.

“Hunter eyes” is forum slang for a deep-set eye with a hooded lid and an outer corner sitting higher than the inner one. It names a look rather than a measurement: the part of it that can actually be measured is canthal tilt, and the rest is the shape of the orbital rim, which is bone.

Forum slang — not a measurement LOOKSMAXBRO uses.

Hydration is simply drinking enough water across the day. LOOKSMAXBRO grades daily water moderate: it is one of the levers on the puffiness that decides how a face reads in the morning, and it is not a treatment for skin, fat or bone.

The hyoid is a small horseshoe-shaped bone floating in the front of the neck above the thyroid cartilage, held in place by muscle alone. It anchors the muscles under the chin, and where it sits is a large part of why one person has a crisp line under the jaw and another does not.

Interpupillary distance is the distance between the centers of the two pupils. It is the yardstick photo measurements get divided by, so that the same face measures the same from two steps closer to the camera or two steps further away.

A jaw exerciser is a silicone or rubber bit you bite against to load the chewing muscles. The LOOKSMAXBRO catalog grades jaw trainers nothing at all: the masseter does get worked, the bone under it does not change, and heavy daily use is one of the more common ways people arrive at jaw pain and clicking.

The jawline is the visible edge of the lower jaw, running from the chin back to the angle below the ear. How sharp it reads is three things stacked — the bone underneath, the fat and fluid over it, and how the head is carried — which is why posture is graded higher than jaw exercises for the way a jawline actually looks.

Landmarks are the numbered points a model places on a face — eye corners, lids, nose tip, lip border, jaw contour — and every measurement on this site is arithmetic done on those points. The browser tools read 478 of them; inside the LOOKSMAXBRO app the landmarks are used for the score and then discarded, never stored and never sent anywhere.

Looksmaxxing is the practice of deliberately improving how you look — through habits, grooming, training and, at its far end, medical procedures. LOOKSMAXBRO covers the habit half of it: sleep, sunscreen, posture, body-fat level, grooming and the drills around them, each carrying the grade of the evidence behind it. It is not a scale, a ranking, or a competition with anybody else.

Lymph nodes are the small filters the lymph system drains through, and the ones that matter for a face sit along the jaw, in front of the ears and above the collarbone. Face drainage massage strokes toward them, which is the entire reason the direction of the stroke is worth getting right.

Lymphatic drainage is light, slow stroking of the face toward the lymph nodes at the jaw and collarbone, to move fluid that settled overnight. LOOKSMAXBRO grades morning drainage weak: it shifts fluid that is already there and buys a few hours, and it does not change the shape of a face.

The mandible is the lower jawbone, the only bone in the skull that moves. Its width, its angle and the projection of the chin are set by growth and genetics; in an adult, training changes the muscle sitting on it and not the bone itself.

The masseter is the thick chewing muscle running from the cheekbone down to the angle of the jaw — the one that bulges when you clench. It is the part of the jaw that does respond to training, which is why LOOKSMAXBRO grades masseter work weak rather than nothing at all: a trained muscle is real, and it is still not a new bone.

Mewing is resting the tongue flat against the roof of the mouth with the lips closed and the teeth lightly together, held as a default posture. The LOOKSMAXBRO catalog grades it nothing at all — there is no controlled evidence that tongue posture reshapes an adult jaw — so it appears as a habit some people keep and never as a way to change bone.

The midface ratio compares the height of the middle third of the face — roughly the pupils down to the top lip — against the width between the cheekbones. It is the proportion behind talk of a “long” or “compact” midface, and like every proportion here it describes a face rather than judging one.

Mogging is forum slang for standing next to someone whose face makes yours look worse by comparison. It is a comparison between two people, which is exactly the thing LOOKSMAXBRO refuses to do — the app compares your scan with your own earlier scans and with nothing else.

Forum slang — not a measurement LOOKSMAXBRO uses.

A moisturizer is the cream that holds water in the skin, applied while the face is still damp from washing. It is step two of the three-step LOOKSMAXBRO morning routine and, together with the cleanser, sits among the handful of skin habits the catalog grades strong.

A morning routine is the fixed short sequence LOOKSMAXBRO runs first thing: water, daylight, a cool rinse, then cleanse, moisturize and sunscreen. Being the same every day is the point — the two strongest-graded steps in it, the cleanse-and-moisturize and the daily SPF, only pay if they actually happen every morning.

A neck hump is the rounded bulge at the base of the neck, where rounded shoulders, a forward head and thickened tissue over the upper spine pile up together. Posture training is what LOOKSMAXBRO does about it; a hump that appeared suddenly or hurts is a question for a doctor, and surgery for one is out of scope here.

Negative canthal tilt means the outer corner of the eye sits lower than the inner corner. It is an ordinary and common way for an eye to be built, it comes from bone and ligament rather than habit, and the things that actually change how it reads in a photo are the height of the camera and the swelling around the eye.

“Nerd neck” is the everyday name for forward head posture — the ear parked ahead of the shoulder after hours over a keyboard or a phone. It describes the same thing the craniovertebral angle measures, and it is trained out rather than braced out.

On-device means the measuring happens on your own phone or in your own browser, with nothing uploaded. The LOOKSMAXBRO score is computed by a model that ships inside the app and runs on the phone’s own chip, and the tools on this site run their landmark model inside the tab — neither one has a server to send a photo to.

The orbital rim is the bony edge of the eye socket that the brow, the outer corner and the under-eye all sit on. It is bone, so no habit moves it; what it does explain is why two people who slept the same eight hours have very different-looking eyes.

The Overall score is the single number LOOKSMAXBRO gives a face scan, with a breakdown across eight things you can work on. It is an aesthetic, entertainment-style number built to make progress visible over weeks — not a medical or psychological assessment, and never a comparison against other people.

Periorbital puffiness is fluid collected in the thin tissue around the eyes, at its worst on waking and easing over the first hours of the day. Sleep, salt and alcohol are the levers LOOKSMAXBRO grades strong for it; morning drainage massage is graded weak and buys hours, not a different face.

The philtrum is the vertical groove between the base of the nose and the top lip. Its length is one of the proportions people are describing when they call a midface “long” or “short”, and nothing short of surgery changes it.

The platysma is the broad, thin sheet of muscle covering the front of the neck from the collarbone up over the jaw. It is the muscle behind the vertical cords that stand out when someone tenses their neck, and it is the reason neck work in a face program is muscle work rather than skin work.

Positive canthal tilt means the outer corner of the eye sits higher than the inner corner. It is the arrangement forum posts call “hunter eyes”, it is set by bone and ligament, and no exercise, tape or pulling changes it — this site marks eyelid pulling harmful, and LOOKSMAXBRO does not teach it.

A posture corrector is a strap or brace worn to hold the shoulders back. The LOOKSMAXBRO catalog has no habit for one and prints no grade beside it: a brace holds a position for as long as it is on, and what changes the position when it is off is training plus a screen raised to eye level.

Posture drills are the short exercises that train a head and shoulders to sit stacked rather than forward — chin tucks, wall holds, shoulder-blade and back work, trunk moves. LOOKSMAXBRO grades them moderate, higher than anything done to the face itself, and they work by changing where the head sits rather than by changing any bone.

The Potential score is the LOOKSMAXBRO estimate of where your Overall score could sit if the habits in your plan actually got done. It is a direction to work in rather than a promise, and the weekly re-scan is the only thing that shows whether the gap is closing.

A prone Y raise is lying face down and lifting both arms overhead into a Y, thumbs up, using the lower part of the shoulder blade. It is the counterweight to a day spent with the shoulders rolled forward, and it belongs to the back half of posture training.

The PSL scale is a one-to-ten face rating used on looksmaxxing forums, named after the boards it grew up on. LOOKSMAXBRO does not use it, publishes no rankings of any kind, and scores a face only against that same face earlier — the app’s number is an aesthetic, entertainment-style metric, not a place in a queue.

Forum slang — not a measurement LOOKSMAXBRO uses.

A re-scan is the repeat face scan LOOKSMAXBRO asks for once a week after the first one, so a score can be compared with itself. A week is the interval because it is long enough for a real change to clear the noise of sleep, salt and lighting.

A retinoid is a vitamin A derivative used on skin at night — retinol over the counter, tretinoin by prescription. Retinoids are not a habit in the LOOKSMAXBRO catalog and carry no grade here; the catalog’s strong skin rows are the morning routine, the evening cleanse and daily SPF. A retinoid belongs strictly in the evening, because it leaves skin more sensitive to daylight. Start low, patch-test on the jawline first, and expect a few weeks of irritation before skin settles.

Rounded shoulders are shoulders that sit forward of the ribcage with the shoulder blades slid apart — the posture a desk day settles into. They travel with a forward head, and the same moderate-graded work addresses both: back and shoulder-blade drills, trunk work, and a screen raised to eye level.

Sebum is the oil skin makes to keep its own barrier intact. Stripping it with harsh washing or scrubbing is the usual reason a face ends up oilier and more irritated at the same time, which is why the LOOKSMAXBRO morning routine asks for a gentle cleanser and a moisturizer instead of a scrub.

The skin barrier is the outermost layer of skin, the one that holds water in and irritants out. Red, tight, stinging skin is the barrier complaining — usually about grit, daily exfoliants or several actives at once — and protecting it is the whole reason the routine stays at three steps.

Sleep is the strongest-graded lever LOOKSMAXBRO has on how puffy a face looks in the morning: short nights, alcohol and lying flat all leave more fluid around the eyes. It is graded strong, which makes it the one item on the eye list that outranks every massage on the same list.

Sodium pulls water into tissue, so a salty evening usually turns up as a puffier face the next morning. It is one of the reasons LOOKSMAXBRO re-scans weekly rather than daily: salt, sleep and lighting move a single day’s reading more than a month of habits does.

Softmaxxing is the forum word for the non-medical half of looksmaxxing: sleep, sunscreen, grooming, training, body-fat level, posture. It is the whole of what LOOKSMAXBRO does, on purpose — those habits are reversible, they can be graded honestly, and they are the part with actual research behind them.

SPF is the number on a sunscreen describing how much longer protected skin takes to burn than bare skin does. Daily morning sunscreen is one of the few skin habits LOOKSMAXBRO grades strong, and it is the last step of the morning routine — over the moisturizer, not mixed into it in your palm.

A streak is the run of consecutive days a habit has been finished, counted per habit inside the LOOKSMAXBRO app. It exists because graded habits only pay off with repetition, and a streak is the cheapest way to make the boring part visible.

Strength training is resistance work for the whole body, and it is the thing that moves body composition — the lever LOOKSMAXBRO grades strong for both cheeks and jawline. It is not face training and is not sold here as any: it works on a face by changing how much fat is sitting on it.

“Subhuman” is forum slang for writing a face off as beyond help. It is not a category, not a measurement and not something LOOKSMAXBRO recognizes: a score here describes a photograph taken on a particular morning and says nothing whatever about a person’s worth.

Forum slang — not a measurement LOOKSMAXBRO uses.

Submental fat is the pad of fat under the chin, the thing most people mean by a double chin. It follows overall body fat and, in a photograph, the position of the head; there is no exercise that removes fat from that one spot, and LOOKSMAXBRO does not claim one.

The tear trough is the groove running from the inner corner of the eye down along the top of the cheek. A deep one casts the shadow people read as a dark circle, and because its depth comes from bone and ligament, sleep and fluid change how it looks far less than they change puffiness.

Upper eyelid exposure is how much of the upper lid is visible between the lash line and the crease when the eye is open and relaxed. Little of it showing is what people call a hooded eye; it depends on the brow bone, the lid’s own anatomy and how swollen the morning left it, and pulling on the lid to change it is exactly the practice this site marks harmful.

A wall angel is standing with the back, head and arms against a wall and sliding the arms up and down without losing contact. It trains the upper back and shoulders to hold a stacked position, and it is the drill most people fail first once their shoulders have rounded forward.

Water retention is fluid held in the tissue instead of being carried away, and in a face it reads as puffiness around the eyes and along the jaw. Salt, alcohol, short sleep and lying flat all push it up, which makes it the most changeable thing about how a face looks from one day to the next — and the reason a single scan is never the whole story.

The zygomatic arch is the bridge of bone running from the cheekbone back toward the ear, and it sets the widest point of the mid-face. It is bone: it is what a face shape measurement reads, not something a habit reshapes.