GONIAL ANGLE

Per Mommaerts (2016), an internet-survey study of perceived attractiveness, the ideal male profile-view gonial angle is approximately 130°. The associated population average sits near 128°, so 'ideal' is close to typical for men. Anything from roughly 120-130° is considered an attractive masculine range. Below 120° (very acute) reads as overly square or 'block-jawed.' Above 135° (very obtuse) starts reading as long-faced or weak-jawed.

No — 130° is essentially the ideal for men per the Mommaerts internet survey on perceived male jaw attractiveness. If you measured 130° you're sitting right at the most-attractive value cited in attractiveness research. The looksmaxxing community sometimes pushes for sharper (more acute) angles around 120-125°, but 130° is well within the strong masculine range.

Mommaerts and Claymaet (2023) in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery report the most attractive female jaw angle at approximately 122-126°, depending on the metric used. So ideal female is slightly more acute than ideal male, though the population means overlap heavily. Don't read too much into 2-3° differences — measurement error from photos exceeds that range.

For attractiveness, both extremes are penalized. 'High angle' (obtuse, 135°+) reads as long-faced and weak-jawed; 'low angle' (acute, sub-115°) reads as overly square and bulky. The visually-rewarded zone for men is ~120-130°, for women ~120-126°. Note that in orthodontic terminology 'high angle' refers to vertical growth pattern (longer face, more obtuse gonion) and 'low angle' refers to horizontal pattern (shorter face, sharper gonion) — these terms describe the whole skeletal type, not just the jaw corner.

Three main causes ranked by impact: (1) genetics — the dominant driver, you inherit your skeletal growth pattern; (2) mouth breathing in childhood — chronic nasal obstruction forces low tongue posture and allows posterior-inferior mandibular rotation, producing what orthodontists call 'adenoid facies'; (3) tooth loss in adulthood — alveolar bone resorption alters mandibular body geometry and increases the gonial angle by ~6° on average. Low childhood chewing effort and tongue posture also contribute but the evidence is weaker.

Honestly: no — not the actual bone angle. The gonial angle is fixed by bone structure that's set by your early 20s. What you CAN change is the visual perception of your jaw corner. Lower body fat sharpens the gonion definition because subcutaneous fat blurs the bone edge. Better posture (forward head correction via chin tucks) improves the visual neck-jaw separation. Masseter hypertrophy from heavy chewing can add visible mass to the jaw corner area. None of these change the underlying skeletal angle. They change how it reads.

No — and the looksmaxxing community has been wrong about this. A 2024 randomized controlled trial (Jung et al., Journal of Oral Rehabilitation, PMID 39215439) found no statistically significant change in gonial angle, bigonial width, ramus height, or mandibular body length from gum-chewing training. Heavy chewing CAN cause masseter muscle hypertrophy, which adds visual mass to the lower-cheek and jaw-corner area — but the underlying bone angle does not move. Mastic gum is a real lever for masseter tone, not for skeletal change.

Three main procedures: (1) Mandibular angle augmentation — silicone or custom implants placed at the gonion to make a weak/obtuse angle appear sharper. Common in male jawline cosmetic surgery. (2) Mandibular angle reduction (V-line surgery) — osteotomy of the angle, often combined with masseter resection. Developed in East Asia for prominent square mandibles; reduces the angle's prominence and feminizes the lower face. (3) BSSO (bilateral sagittal split osteotomy) — corrects severe skeletal Class II/III patterns and incidentally affects gonial geometry. Genioplasty (chin advancement) and masseter Botox affect adjacent structures but don't change the gonial angle itself.

Counterintuitive answer: usually it makes the gonion LESS visually defined, not more. Masseter Botox slims the lower face by reducing masseter thickness 6-15%, which is desirable for square or 'over-developed' jaws but reduces the visual mass at the gonion area. A 2017 study also found repeated injections decrease bone volume at the gonial angle. If your goal is a sharper / more masculine jaw corner, masseter Botox typically works against you. If your goal is a slimmer / less square lower face, it helps.

Accuracy is roughly ±5-10°. Soft tissue overlay obscures the true bony landmarks, beard or fat at the jaw corner shifts the apparent gonion, and even small (5°) head rotation can change the reading by several degrees. Treat photo measurement as a category indicator (acute / normal / obtuse) rather than a precise number. The only definitive measurement is from a lateral cephalometric radiograph or panoramic X-ray — typically only available through orthodontists or oral surgeons.

Yes, mostly through tooth loss. The angle generally decreases (becomes more acute) from birth through young adulthood as the mandible matures. In older age, edentulous individuals show a significant increase (~6° more obtuse) due to alveolar bone resorption changing the geometry of the mandibular body. So the trajectory is: obtuse at birth → most acute in young adulthood → more obtuse again with tooth loss in old age. Aging without significant tooth loss shows much smaller changes.