How a sculpted jaw became the new holy grail of beauty

A defined jawline is the latest aesthetic ideal on the red carpet and beyond. Katie Rosseinsky explores how this became another impossible standard to live up to. In 2006, the legendary writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron was, to borrow the title of the book she released that year, feeling bad about her neck. The perceived decline of this particular part of the body was a real tell-tale sign of ageing, Ephron believed. But if she was around to muse on beauty culture in 2025, I’m pretty sure she would have honed in a little higher up, with her (self) critical gaze landing somewhere around the mandible bone that lends shape to our lower faces and chins. Because right now, I feel pretty bad about my jawline. And I’m certainly not the only one.

A defined jawline has been a desirable physical trait for decades, even centuries. Just think of the square-jawed hunks of Old Hollywood, the angular beauty of Katharine Hepburn, or, for a few more contemporary examples, Angelina Jolie’s exquisite bone structure and Bella Hadid’s striking features. For as long as I’ve been aware of what’s deemed beautiful (aka ever since I was a young girl listening in on older women bemoaning their appearances), I’ve had it drilled into me that a double chin was something to try and avoid. I’m someone who is naturally round of face, so this particular flaw was always my personal neurosis; photos in which I had any wobbliness around the jawline would get deleted (or at least detagged).

But over the past five years or so, a so-called “snatched” jaw – to parrot a TikTok-friendly phrase that was in turn borrowed from drag culture – seems to have become a universal holy grail of beauty. It’s now an undeniable aesthetic status symbol – or, alternatively, just the latest impossible aesthetic ideal for us to castigate ourselves for failing to embody. My ever-present but mostly dormant fixation has re-emerged, because perfectly sculpted jawlines, plus a whole load of beauty treatments, surgical and non-surgical fixes and deeply dubious hacks promising fast results, are everywhere.

Look at any red carpet during awards season and you’ll see an apparently endless stream of perfectly angled jawlines, sharp enough to cut glass, and side profiles that are noticeably free from the puffiness, double chins and incipient jowls that seem to plague us mere mortals. Margot Robbie, Lily-Rose Depp and Emily Ratajkowski are just a handful of mandibular-ly blessed celebs who spring to mind, while ultra-sleek jawlines have also contributed to the recent incredible “glow-ups” of two Nineties and Noughties stars, Christina Aguilera and Lindsay Lohan (neither woman has commented on or confirmed any surgery rumours, but that has only increased feverish speculation online).

But this is a beauty standard that seems to be just as prevalent among leading men. For every actor who’s clearly been genetically blessed with an almost cartoonishly square jaw since his teen idol days, there’s a clutch of male stars who have re-emerged onto the scene, after an absence from the public eye, with strikingly stronger, more chiselled jawlines, as if they’d recently been reimagined as cartoon superheroes.

A few years back, former Disney heartthrob Zac Efron sparked conjecture when his face shape underwent a striking change. He later explained that he’d in fact undergone corrective surgery after hitting his chin on a fountain; after that, his other facial muscles overcompensated. “The masseters just grew,” he told Men’s Health in 2022. Comedians such as Matt Rife and John Mulaney have been subjected to the “then and now” transformation photo galleries that are more commonly used to overanalyse the intricacies of women’s faces online (Rife has denied plastic surgery, while Mulaney hasn’t commented).

This is a beauty standard that seems to be just as prevalent among leading men. For men, a defined jaw tends to be associated with a sort of hyper-masculinity. In women, conversely, I fear this fetishisation is part of the swing back towards skinniness, thanks to Ozempic’s ubiquity. For both genders, these sharper-than-sharp facial angles signify vitality and youthfulness. As we get older, we don’t just lose youth-enhancing collagen: a process known as bone resorption, in which our bones are broken down and absorbed by the body, also results in shrinking or weakening around the jaw. That can cause the whole structure of our face to change, leaving us looking saggier and jowlier.

Once, only a surgical procedure such as a facelift could have spruced up a sagging jaw. Now, though, the beauty industry has moved on so significantly that there are a plethora of options for those wanting to take action. Some practitioners suggest ultrasound or radiofrequency treatments to stimulate collagen production and “tighten” up the offending area. Others opt for injectables to shape and sharpen the contours of the face.