What is canthal tilt?
Canthal tilt is the angle of the line connecting your inner and outer eye corners — the medial canthus and the lateral canthus. If the outer corner sits higher than the inner corner, you have positive tilt. If they sit at the same height, neutral tilt. If the outer corner sits lower, negative tilt.
That single angle gets disproportionate attention online because it's one of the few facial proportions that's easy to measure and easy to compare. It's also one of the few that meaningfully changes how a face is read on camera.
The three categories
Positive canthal tilt
Outer corner above inner corner, typically 2°–10°. Reads as alert, dominant, sometimes intense. Many people associate positive tilt with conventionally "model" faces, especially in male faces. The eye shape tends to look almond-like.
Neutral canthal tilt
Inner and outer corners roughly level (within ±2°). Neutral tilt reads as balanced and unremarkable in either direction — it's the most common bracket for both men and women.
Negative canthal tilt
Outer corner below inner corner. Reads as softer, sometimes sleepy or sad — not bad, just a different mood. Negative tilt is more common in older faces because the lateral canthus drops a fraction of a millimeter per decade as the orbital ligament loosens.
How Omoggle measures it
We grab two facial keypoints per eye — the medial canthus (landmark 133 / 362 in the MediaPipe FaceMesh topology) and the lateral canthus (landmark 33 / 263) — and compute the angle between the canthus line and the horizontal. The two eyes are averaged.
A few things shift the score in either direction:
- Head tilt. If you tilt your head sideways, the measurement is wrong. We try to correct for it using the line between your nasal bridge and chin, but tilting more than ~15° still introduces noise.
- Camera height. Down-angled cameras make tilt look more positive than it is. A camera at eye-level is honest; below eye-level flatters; above eye-level penalizes.
- Squinting. Eye open-ness changes where the outer corner appears. Resting face beats holding a smile during the scan.
Does it actually matter?
For an aesthetic snapshot, slightly positive tilt helps — but the effect is smaller than the internet pretends. We see plenty of high-PSL faces in the neutral and even mildly negative buckets. Symmetry and harmony do far more heavy lifting than the canthal angle alone.
For audience-judged battles, tilt barely moves the needle compared to lighting and confidence. People vote for faces that look like they're enjoying themselves, regardless of the geometry.
Want to see your own canthal tilt? It's part of every PSL scan.
Run a PSL scan →