The Best Earrings for Your Face Shape

Face-shape advice for earrings is often stated as law when it is really a rule of thumb. The underlying idea is sound though: an earring is a shape sitting next to another shape, and shapes either echo each other or contrast. Contrast is usually more interesting.

Here is the honest version, including where the rules stop mattering.

Work out your face shape in ten seconds

Pull your hair back, look straight into a mirror, and ask two questions. Is your face longer than it is wide, or about equal? And is your jaw wider, narrower, or the same as your cheekbones?

Roughly equal with a soft jaw is round. Longer than wide is oblong. Wide cheekbones tapering to a narrow chin is heart. Similar width top and bottom with a defined jaw is square. Everything in between is oval, which is most people.

Round faces: length beats width

You want vertical movement, so a drop that hangs rather than spreads. Our two-stone drop is built exactly this way - stacked stones with a short fringe, so the eye travels down instead of out.

Avoid large hoops and very wide crescents worn high on the lobe. They repeat the curve of your face at the same scale, and repetition makes both shapes look wider.

Oblong and long faces: width helps

The opposite. You are looking for horizontal interest to break up the length, which makes a wide chandbali genuinely flattering - the crescent of our cat's-eye chandbali is broader than it is tall, and that is the point.

Be careful with very long narrow drops. They extend a line that is already long.

Heart-shaped faces: weight at the bottom

With wide cheekbones and a narrow chin, you want visual weight low, so the earring balances the taper. A jhumka is close to ideal: the widest part of a temple jhumka dome sits at the bottom, level with your jaw, exactly where you want it.

Very top-heavy studs do the reverse and emphasise the width already up there.

Square faces: curves against angles

Round and domed shapes soften a defined jaw. Jhumkas, round cabochons, and crescents all work. Sharp geometric studs echo the angle of your jaw, which reads as harder rather than balanced - though if that is the look you want, it is a legitimate choice rather than a mistake.

Oval faces

You can wear anything, which is less helpful than it sounds. Choose by outfit and by occasion instead of by face, and pick the pair whose scale matches how dressed-up you are.

The two things that matter more than face shape

Neck length. This decides more than the shape of your face. On a shorter neck a very long drop closes the gap and shortens it further; a mid-length earring worn with hair up opens it. If you only take one thing from this article, take this one.

Where the earring sits. Two pairs of the same length hang differently depending on how high the piercing is and how thick the lobe is. Which is the case for looking at a photograph of a pair being worn rather than at a measurement - every one of our product pages has one for that reason.

And then ignore all of it

These are starting points for narrowing down a long list, not verdicts. The pair you reach for repeatedly beats the pair that theoretically suits your bone structure. If you love a wide chandbali and you have a round face, wear the wide chandbali.

Have a look through the full range and judge by the on-model photographs.