Best Haircuts for Men With Round Faces

The best haircuts for men with round faces take width off the sides first and add height second, in that order. The usual advice has this backwards and tells you to pile length on top. Height does help. But the sides are where a round face is made wider, and if the weight is left sitting above your ears, no amount of quiff is going to rescue it.

Round, or just soft along the jaw

Worth working out which one you have, because they want different things.

A genuinely round face measures roughly as wide across the cheekbones as it is long from hairline to chin, with a soft jaw and no hard corner at the back of it. That is a skull and bone structure, and a haircut can flatter it but not change it.

What walks into the shop far more often is a face of perfectly ordinary proportions that has lost its definition along the jaw. It reads as round in photographs and in bad lighting, and the man wearing it has decided he has a round face. He mostly does not. He has a jaw that has gone quiet.

Push your hair back off your forehead and look in a mirror at arm's length rather than at a phone held under your chin. If the width is at your cheekbones and the length genuinely is not there, read on. If the width is lower down, around the jaw and under the chin, the haircut is the smaller half of your answer and we will come back to that.

The sides matter more than the height on top

The widest part of your head is not your cheekbones. It is the parietal ridge, the shelf where the top of your skull turns over and starts running down towards your ears. On most men it sits a touch above the top of the ear. Leave hair sitting on that shelf and you are adding width at exactly the height where a round face has too much of it already.

Which is why the fade height matters more than the length on top. Take the sides tight at and below that ridge and the widest point of your whole head moves up into the top section, where the shape is under our control instead of your skull's. The face reads longer and you have not added an inch of anything.

The choice between a fade and a taper is about upkeep rather than shape, and we have set that argument out in full elsewhere. For width, either one does the job, so long as the line is placed high enough to be doing a job at all. A fade that stops level with the top of the ear leaves the shelf untouched, and then nothing happening on top will save it.

One caution, because this is the way it goes wrong. High and tight on both sides with a lot of height dropped in above gives you a narrow stem and a wide round top. We take the corners off the top section as well, point cutting into the sides of it so it does not flare back out over the fade. Nobody asks for that part. It is the difference between the cut working and the cut looking like a haircut you are wearing.

The four best haircuts for a round face

Skin fade taken to a mid or high line, two to three inches on top, £17 and 40 minutes. The straightest answer to the problem. Skin at the bottom, blended up past the ridge, enough left on top to sweep back or to one side. The trade-off is your diary. This one wants you back inside a fortnight, and if that is not realistic, take the next cut on the list instead.

Taper fade with a side part, £17 and 40 minutes. A taper stops short of skin, so there is no bald baseline growing back in and you can stretch it to three weeks. The parting is doing separate work. A hard side part puts a diagonal across the top of your head, and a diagonal is the one line a round face has none of. Dead-centre partings do the opposite, so if you have worn one for twenty years, this is the cut where we will ask you to move it.

Scissor cut with the weight taken out of the temples, £15 and 30 minutes. No clipper line at all, for men whose work or whose taste rules one out. The weight comes off the corners above the temple with scissors over comb, and the top is left long enough to have some lift at the front. Softer than a fade, and it holds its shape for a month instead of a fortnight.

Crew cut, £10 and 20 minutes. The honest option. It does not lengthen your face and we would not pretend otherwise. What it does is stop the cut competing with the shape, and a lot of men find a very short cut suits them better than years of trying to build height they were never going to get. No product, nothing to do at seven in the morning.

What makes a round face rounder

A blunt fringe running flat across the forehead. It puts a horizontal line halfway down the only vertical measurement you have. The French crop is a genuinely good cut and we cut plenty of them, but that fringe is built for a long narrow face, and it is the cut men with round faces ask for most because they have seen it looking superb on someone shaped nothing like them.

Weight left over the ears. Grown-out sides, or hair long enough to tuck behind the ear. Same shelf, same problem.

A beard grown evenly all the way round. It sits on the shape underneath and doubles it. Ask for a tapered beard instead, short at the sideburn and longest at the chin, so the weight collects at the bottom of your face. That is £11 and fifteen minutes, and for the man whose jaw has gone quiet rather than whose skull is round, it will outperform any haircut in this list.

The fourth week. A fade grows down before it grows out. By the fourth week the hair is back on the ridge and you are wearing a shape you did not ask for, which is why this is one of the cuts where the fortnight actually matters, and why it is worth putting the next one in the diary on your way out.

What we cannot guess

"Sides down to a 1, fade it up above the top of my ear. About three inches left on top, and keep the top narrow at the sides. I part it on the left." That is the whole brief and it covers the three things we cannot guess: how high, how much, and which way it falls.

Two more worth mentioning if they apply. A cowlick at the crown puts a floor under how short the top can go, and we would rather hear about it before we start than work it out halfway through. Hair that turns curly the moment it is humid needs a different amount of weight left in it than straight hair does.

Bring a photo by all means. Just bring it knowing that the man in it may have a completely different jaw to yours, and that what actually transfers from a picture is the fade height and the length on top. The rest of it is your face. If you cannot tell which of the two we would be cutting around, ask us at the mirror before anything starts. That is thirty seconds of looking, and it saves you three weeks of a cut you did not ask for.