Eye shape self-test
What Shape Eyes Do I Have
Three minutes into a makeup tutorial, the creator says this one is for hooded eyes, and suddenly what shape eyes do I have is the question standing between you and the next eight minutes. Search numbers back the moment up. Eye shape quiz and self-test queries pull thousands of searches a month, because the answer changes everything downstream. Liner placement changes. So does where shadow goes.
The good news is you can answer it yourself in five minutes with a mirror and honest light. Eye shape comes down to a handful of observable traits, your crease, how much of your iris shows, the tilt of your outer corners, and how deep your eyes sit in the socket. No scan. No appointment.
Work through each check in order, then tally your answers in the checklist quiz at the end.
The quick answer
Stand at a mirror with a relaxed face and check four traits. A crease visible with lid space below it means non-hooded, skin covering it means hooded, no crease means monolid. An iris touching both lids points to almond, white showing above or below points to round. An imaginary line from inner to outer corner reads upturned, downturned, or level, and a side glance shows depth. Most people land on a hybrid, like hooded almond.
Or skip the mirror work. The free eye shape detector reads all four traits from one photo in seconds.
What kind of eyes do I have? Three questions to start
Every classification on this page comes from three observations. Answer these first.
Is your crease visible with your eyes open?
The fold test.
Look straight ahead, brows relaxed. The supratarsal crease is the fold where your lid tucks inward. Seeing it across the full lid, with skin showing below, is one answer. Skin drooping over it, or no fold at all, gives you the other two.
How much white shows around your iris?
The sclera test.
The iris is the colored disc, and the white around it is the sclera. Check whether the iris touches both lids, floats with white below it, or rides high with white above. Each pattern belongs to a different shape family.
Do your outer corners sit higher, lower, or level?
The tilt test.
Picture a horizontal line from your inner corner (the medial canthus) to your outer corner (the lateral canthus). The direction that line travels is your canthal tilt, and makeup artists build whole looks around it.
How to know your eye shape with the mirror test
The mirror test is the method behind every answer on this page, and it takes more care than people expect.
- Face a window in daylight. Overhead bathroom lighting throws shadows that fake a deep-set look on almost anyone.
- Stand back about arm's length, roughly the distance another person sees you from.
- Neutral face, brows fully relaxed. (Most of us hold our brows half-raised without noticing.)
- Don't lift your brows to open your eyes wider. Raised brows un-hood a hooded lid in seconds, which ruins the reading.
- No squinting and no widening. Both change how much sclera shows.
- Skip front-camera selfies for now. Several apps reshape eyes by default, sometimes without telling you.
The eyebrow problem.
A friend of mine spent years doing her shadow for almond eyes until a flash photo at a wedding showed her crease gone, folded under her lid. Hooded the whole time. Her mirror had lied because her eyebrows did half the work.
The crease check and hooded vs non hooded eyes
Hooded vs non hooded eyes decides where liner and shadow can physically sit, so this check carries the most search traffic. Face the mirror, relax, find the crease.
AI-generated illustrations. Examples show selected features, not exact matches for every face.
- Visible crease with lid space below it. That's a non-hooded lid, often called a double eyelid, and the open lid space is your working area for shadow.
- Crease partly or fully covered. Skin from above folds down over the crease and hides some or all of the mobile lid. That's hooding, from a sliver of coverage to skin resting on the lashes.
- No crease at all. A smooth lid from lash line to brow is a monolid, common in East Asian ancestry and present everywhere else too.
For borderline cases, watch the outer third of the lid. That's how to tell if you have hooded eyes when the crease only half-disappears, since hooding usually starts at the outer corner. The liner giveaway is transfer. If your wing stamps a faint copy of itself onto the skin above by 3pm, that skin is touching your liner all day. The hooded eyes guide goes deeper.
The iris visibility test, and do I have big eyes?
Face relaxed, look at where your iris sits against your lash lines. If the top and bottom of the iris both touch the lids, or come close, you're in almond territory. White sclera below the iris pushes toward round, and a forward-projecting eye often shows white too.
People searching how to know if you have big eyes are usually measuring this exact trait. Big-looking eyes expose more sclera and more lid. It's a visibility ratio, not an actual size difference, since most adult eyeballs sit within a millimeter or two of the the same size. What changes is how much of the ball the lids reveal.
AI-generated illustrations. Examples show selected features, not exact matches for every face.
Canthal tilt, from upturned to downturned
Draw an imaginary horizontal line straight out from your medial canthus. Now check where the outer corner lands against it.
AI-generated illustrations. Examples show selected features, not exact matches for every face.
- Above the line. A positive canthal tilt, and the upturned eye shape that comes with it reads lifted even at rest.
- Below the line. A negative tilt gives downturned eyes their soft, slightly heavy outer third. Winged liner fights this shape unless you adjust the angle.
- Level. Neutral tilt, the most common reading, and it pairs with nearly any lid type.
The cat eye shape in humans is mostly this test exaggerated, an upward tilt plus an almond iris fit, sometimes with outer-corner hooding. Even a two-degree difference is noticable once you know where to look. If your line clearly climbs or drops, the upturned eyes and downturned eyes pages cover styling for each.
Depth and spacing, from deep set eyes vs normal to wide-set
Depth is a profile question, so turn sideways or grab a second mirror. In deep set eyes vs normal placement, the brow bone does the talking. A prominent orbital rim shadows an eye sitting back in the socket. Average placement puts eye and brow bone on one plane. Protruding reverses it, the globe sits forward of the rim and the lids look fuller.
For deep set vs protruding eyes, try the flashlight check in a dim room. Shine a small light down from above your brow. Heavy shadow pooling over the eye suggests deep-set. Barely any shadow suggests protruding. The deep-set eyes guide explains why this trait changes shadow placement so much.
Spacing is a front-view measurement. Compare the gap between your inner corners to one eye's width. Smaller reads close-set, wider reads wide-set, roughly equal is average. Most people land on average, at least in my experience.
The DIY eye shape checklist
Nine yes-or-no questions, answered from your mirror work. Tally the yeses and read the right column. This is a self-assessment for styling, and it carries zero medical weight.
| Ask yourself | A yes points toward |
|---|---|
| Can you see your crease across the whole lid while your eyes are open? | Non-hooded (double eyelid) |
| Does skin touch or cover your lash line when you look straight ahead? | Hooded |
| Is there no crease at all, a smooth lid from lashes to brow? | Monolid |
| Does your iris touch the top and bottom lids at the same time? | Almond |
| Can you see white below your iris with a relaxed face? | Round or protruding |
| Does the inner-to-outer corner line climb upward? | Upturned |
| Does it drop downward instead? | Downturned |
| Does your brow bone shadow your eyes in a profile view? | Deep-set |
| Is the gap between your inner corners wider than one eye? | Wide-set |
Nobody answers yes to one row only. Your result is a stack. Covered crease plus iris touching both lids plus an upward line reads as hooded, almond, and upturned, a profile you can take to a makeup counter.
Common result profiles, and why hybrids are the norm
Three stacks show up over and over in self-test results. See if one sounds like your tally.
Hooded almond eyes
Crease covered, iris touching both lids.
Possibly the most common stack in quiz results. Liner tutorials struggle with it because the wing lands on moving skin, which is why the transfer-by-3pm problem shows up so often.
Deep-set downturned eyes
Shadowed socket, outer corners below the line.
Bold brows and darker lower-lash looks come naturally here. The orbital shadow already does half the contouring, so heavy crease work can tip into muddy fast.
Round non-hooded eyes
Visible crease, open lid, sclera below the iris.
Open and bright at rest. This profile handles shimmer on the center of the lid well, and tightlining adds definition without stealing lid space.
Treat these as starting points. Your own stack will mix and match, and that's normal. I could be wrong here, but the hybrid is the interesting part.
Photos, angles, and why selfies lie
For a record of the test, take two photos, one front-on and one true profile, both in window light with a neutral face. Have someone else hold the phone at eye level, about five feet away.
Arm's-length selfies distort everything. A close wide-angle lens bulges the center of your face and shrinks the edges, which can fake rounder eyes and wider spacing. Flash flattens depth cues, so deep-set eyes can photograph as average. And beauty filters quietly lift outer corners and enlarge eyes a few percent, enough to flip a downturned reading into upturned. Check photos against the mirror, never the other way around.
Frequently asked questions
Can my eye shape change over time?
Slowly, yes. Skin loses elasticity with age, so a crease exposed at 25 can sit partly hooded by 45, and canthal tilt can soften as outer-corner support relaxes. A sudden change is different. One lid drooping over weeks, new asymmetry, or unequal pupils all deserve a doctor, and ptosis in particular is a real condition with real treatments.
Why do I look different in photos versus the mirror?
Lens distortion does most of it. A phone held close exaggerates the middle of your face and shrinks the edges, while your mirror shows a reversed image your brain has smoothed over for decades. Trust a relaxed daylight mirror check over any single photo.
What if my eyes are asymmetrical?
Nearly everyone has some. One lid slightly more hooded, one corner a degree lower, one eye a millimeter more open. Classify each eye on its own when the difference is obvious, and style for the more hooded or more downturned side, since that side sets the constraint. Sudden asymmetry with a drooping lid is worth a medical visit.
Are hunter eyes or teardrop eyes real categories?
Mostly internet categories. Hunter eyes usually means deep-set, hooded, positively tilted eyes with little sclera showing, a stack of the traits from this page. Teardrop eyes is a looser label for downturned, roundish eyes. Neither term is clinical. Break both into the checks above and you can describe them without inventing new shapes.
Next steps
Four checks, one tally, and a shape stack you can say out loud. Browse the full eye shapes guide for every type in the cluster, or open the eye shape chart to see your result drawn beside the rest. If hooding or depth surprised you, those two traits change makeup the most, and their pages go deeper.