How to Get the Best Bangs for Your Face Shape

Learn how to get more bang for your buck

By Megan Vigil Mar 03, 2015 7:34 PMTags
Beyonce, Hair, 2003SGranitz/WireImage

Want to get more bang for your buck? Simply knowing your face shape might just give you some fringe benefits.

Perhaps you have a square face like Angelina Jolie or an oval face like Beyoncé. When you recognize your face's general dimensions, you give yourself a chance to find the best haircuts to complement or balance out your look. Below are a just few tips and tricks for the most common mug shapes. Now let's put our best face forward, shall we?

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Ginnifer GoodwinMichelle Williams and Mila Kunis might know a little bit about having face shapes that are as long as they are wide. Round visages might also include short, soft jawlines. If you share these features, adding some angles would be ideal to giving your face a more structured look.

Blunt bangs cut above the brow give the illusion of face length. If you have them any longer than that, you might be accentuating the widest part of the face, thereby defining the roundness of the face. Another great way to help create facial balance is by getting soft, textured, sideswept fringe. This helps to widen the forehead, add angular shape and to soften the look of wider cheeks.

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Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Richie and Jennifer Garner are known to have square face shapes because their jaws are closer in alignment to their cheekbones and foreheads.

The best bang shape for faces like these is usually heavy eye-length bangs that hang just below the eyebrows. Textured or feathered tips that reveal a little bit of the forehead are ideal because they help to soften harder, angular features. Making sure that the sides of the bangs are longer than the center is important in order to help break up the straightness of the face. Sideswept fringe is also another great way to do this.

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If your face is wider at the cheeks and forehead and narrows to a pointier chin, then you may have few things in common with heart-faced actresses like Reese Witherspoon, Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez.

To help balance a heart-shaped visage, the goal would be to "shrink" the wideness of the forehead. A good style to help achieve this is with longer, feathered sideswept bangs that are shorter in the middle of the face. This technique helps to slim the forehead while drawing the attention downward toward the eyes.

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Megan Fox, Lea Michele and Alexa Chung are all ladies who share an oval face shape. Oval-shaped faces are usually marked by a slightly wider temple area and a softer jawline that shares its width with the upper half of the face. If you have this face shape than almost any fringe style can work with you.

Heavy, blunt, longer bangs, cut in between the brows and the eyes, can look extra hot on an oval face. When you've got it, flaunt it.

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A triangle or pear-shaped face is characterized by a smaller forehead and a wider jawline. You can see these pairings on the faces of Kelly Osbourne, Kate Moss and Minnie Driver.

Beneficial bangs for these face traits would include deep parts to widen the forehead and balance the jawline. Sideswept temple-length fringe helps to widen the top half of the face to help balance it with the jawline.

All of these face shapes have something interesting to offer any look, but getting the right cut to show them off could only be a few inches away.