Tuck your chin a centimetre and you have changed the line between your jaw and your neck more than most syringes ever will. Which makes the lower face the hardest part of a person to photograph honestly, and it means a chin or jawline filler before and after is best read from the ears inward.
Start with the ears, because no filler ever goes near them
Here is the useful thing about ears: nothing in a chin or jawline filler appointment goes anywhere near one. Whatever the filler did between the two pictures, it did not happen to an ear.
That makes them your fixed point, and using them takes three seconds. In a matched pair the ears look the same in both frames: the same amount of ear on show, sitting at the same height beside the jaw. Turn a head slightly and the far ear slides out of the picture or back into it; tip the chin down and the ear sits higher against the jawline. Neither movement feels like anything at all.
The shoulders back the ears up, for the same reason: no syringe went near a shoulder either. If one has come nearer the lens, or the neckline of a top sits at a different angle, the pose moved even where the face looks steady.
All of which matters more down here than higher up the face, because a jawline is not really a feature. It is the line where your face stops and your neck begins, so moving the head alters it without touching either part. A pair whose ears don't match is a perfectly honest photograph. It is a photograph of a head that moved.
The height of the lens is half the jawline
One more thing moves in these photographs, and it isn't the face. It's the camera.
Think about why an assistant referee spends a whole match running up and down the touchline, keeping level with the last defender. The job is to say whether two players were level with each other at the moment the ball was kicked, and whether two people are level is something you can only judge from level with them. Watch that same moment from ten yards further up the pitch and a player who is exactly level looks a clear yard ahead, because the two of them sit at different distances from you and your eye has to stack them up somehow.
A chin and a neck sit at different distances from a lens in that way. Hold a phone low and point it upward, and the neck all but leaves the picture while the jaw stands against the ceiling. Hold it high and look down, and the jaw settles back into the neck and the chin retreats. It is a large change, it costs nothing, and almost nobody notices making it.
Happily, the height reads straight off the face: if one picture looks a little up the nose and the next looks down at a crown, the lens moved, whatever else did.
What a ceiling light does to the underside of a jaw
Now the third jawline nobody paid for, and this one is drawn by a lamp.
Walk down a row of shops at midday in summer. Every awning has a hard black band underneath it, and from the far pavement each shopfront looks as though it steps sharply inward along that line. Come back on a grey Tuesday and the street has gone soft. The awnings stick out as far as they ever did; now you'd have to stand under one and look up to know it.
A jaw sits over a neck in the same way. Light arriving from above lands along the top of the jawbone and leaves everything below it dark, and the boundary between the two reads as a border, whether or not the bone underneath is drawing one. So a jawline photographed under a downlight arrives with definition included.
It works in reverse just as reliably, which is the half worth holding on to: flat light on an overcast afternoon takes that border away again, so lovely work can photograph as though very little had happened. Nobody is up to anything; that is simply weather.
The tell sits elsewhere in the frame. Light from above darkens the eye sockets and drops small shadows under the nose and lower lip. Where you can see those, the lamp was overhead, and some of that jawline belongs to the ceiling.
A lower face needs four photographs, not two
A result down here is really two claims, and each lives in a different view.
A chin change is a change in how far the chin comes forward, and forward is the direction a photograph gives up first; why filler work hides in a straight-on shot is written out separately. A jawline change is a different animal, because a border is a line: from the front you see where the face ends on both sides, and from the side you follow its whole run from ear to chin. So jawline work shows in both views, and chin work is mostly a side-view story.
An honest lower-face set is therefore profile and front-on, before and after: four frames, matched for head position, lens height and light. One view is only ever half an answer, however good the picture.
Dates belong on all four. Filler holds its shape from the moment it goes in, so the change is there immediately, but a chin carries on arriving at its final shape for two to three weeks afterwards as any swelling from the appointment goes down. That timetable is this treatment's own, and it sits on our chin augmentation page. It's why a photograph from the day itself shows something still settling.
A chin change is forward, not wider
Here is the balance point, and knowing it spares a lot of disappointment. Chin filler brings a chin forward along the line of the profile, and forward is mostly all it does. So from the front it reads quietly: the lower third looks more settled and most people couldn't tell you what moved. That is the treatment doing what it was asked to do, not falling short of it.
Too much in a lower face tends to announce itself in one of two ways. Either the border keeps going past the point where the face turns the corner, so the jaw runs straight through a stretch that ought to have curved. Or the chin reads as a piece sitting in front of the face rather than as the end of it, because its edges don't meet anything on either side.
A balanced result is far harder to describe, and that is rather the whole of it: jaw, chin and mouth still plainly belong to one face, and your eye takes in the lower third instead of stopping on a part of it. Which of those a photograph is showing you is a judgement about somebody else's proportions, mind you. Yours get looked at properly in a consultation. What chin and jawline filler actually do covers the treatment itself, including what it honestly won't fix.
Take the profile nobody has ever taken of you
Hardly anyone owns a decent photograph of their own side view. Your own camera cannot take one while you're turned away from it, and nobody else has ever had a reason to. So the one view a chin result lives in is missing from very nearly every phone in the country, yours included.
A minute puts that right. Here is how to take one you'll be able to match later.
Prop your phone at your own eye height, on a windowsill or a stack of books, and set the timer. Stand side-on and note where your feet are, using a floorboard or the edge of a rug, so you can find the spot again. Pick one thing on the wall to look at, so your head lands the same way twice, and keep your teeth lightly together — the same jaw position both times is the whole point — with your lips resting rather than smiling. Push your hair back off the ear and the jaw, because the ear has a job to do here. Use daylight from a window rather than the light above you, and go back at the same time of day for the second one. Then, without moving your feet, turn and face the phone for the front-on shot. Date them.
Then bring the side view in. Arrange your consultation and name what has been bothering you: a jaw gone vague, or a chin sitting further back than you'd like. We'll tell you plainly what filler would change and what it wouldn't. If what's softening your line is a pocket under the chin, that's a different job altogether; if it's the width of your jaw rather than its border, that's a question about muscle. Every injectable at Broadway Retreat is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester, and nothing goes ahead until you've decided.
Nobody has taken your side view yet. It takes a minute, and it shows you the half of your own face you have never properly looked at.