If you’ve got a full face or round face shape, you’re not going to want to miss this article.
I’m going to walk through all of the different length ranges: short, medium, and long length.
I’m going to talk to you about what you need to stay away from, what you should pay attention to and what you might want to actually do with your hair so that you can pick the best style for you.
I’m going to help you understand how to make the length that you want work for you.
Table of Contents
Short Hair For Round Face
First let’s talk about short hair.
What can happen is the more volume you put on the sides of your hair, the more you’re going to add width.
But on top of that, it also creates the illusion that there’s less volume on top, which also creates more width. So it actually kind of doubles the impact.
What you would want to do instead is create more volume on top to accentuate cheek structure. You really want to follow that cheek line up.
And then if you follow that cheek line, where that cheek line goes, that’s where you’d want to create volume. And then you’d also want to create it on the top.
Just think less volume on the sides, more volume on the top. That’s going to help to create a more elongation and offset any sort of fullness.
Even if you don’t have a lot of volume, having your hair flip out on the sides or in the back, like around the neck and around the ears, that will do the same thing.
You’re drawing more volume or the illusion of more volume to the sides and therefore accentuating more width in your face shape.
Don’t rule bangs out of the equation completely. You can still wear bangs, you just want to be mindful of how you go about wearing them.
What you want to stay away from is thick bangs, especially if they’re square and straight, especially if they’re longer than the eyebrow or at the eyebrow.
Because what that will do is actually shorten your face and close you off and create more accentuation to the cheeks, not cheek structure.
What you want to think is you want to open your face up a little bit, so that you see more of your forehead through it and that way you’re going to again create more elongation.
Or if you want to have some softness, just think less actual thickness. So some pieces, but your main goal is to see your forehead through your bangs.
Medium Hair For Round Face
Let’s talk about medium length.
When I’m talking about medium length hair, what I’m referring to is basically any length that’s roughly in the chin, bob shapes above the shoulders.
If you’re going to go into a medium-length shape, you want to pay attention again to fullness on the sides.
You don’t want to have too much fullness on the sides because that’s going to obviously, again, create more width.
You also want to stay away from any sort of length that goes into your chin. Any length directly at your chin, like a bob shape, is definitely going to accentuate more roundness and fullness and therefore not elongate, which is what you’re trying to do in the first place.
Many times this can be avoided simply by layering your hair.
I see a lot of times where people won’t layer it because they’re concerned if maybe it’s too thin or too fine and therefore it ends up being very triangular shape, which means that the top is very heavy, it’s lacking volume in the top and it’s creating more width to the sides, which is doing essentially the same thing as having that length into the chin. It’s adding more width and creating more fullness.
There are correct and incorrect ways to do it. You can layer thin, fine hair so that you don’t make it look too thin and you actually create volume. But that’s a topic for another article.
Another thing you want to pay attention to in these length ranges is having a lot of layers.
Again flipping your hair out on the sides can be even more problematic at a medium length than at a short length because it just so happens that that fullness is right at your chin, and that means that it’s accentuating specifically fullness right in that one area and that is creating more roundness.
What about bangs?
If you’re going to do bangs, you still can wear bangs, but you’re going to basically want to follow the same rules of thumb as I was mentioning in shorter hair.
You want to stay away from anything that’s too strong and bold or too thick. If you’re going to wear more bangs, you want to be sure that you can see your forehead through.
You just want to pay attention to showing a little bit more of your face so that you can create more length.
Some people say center parts are a great option. I personally don’t necessarily subscribe to that and the reason that I stay away from center parts is because when you’re dealing with a fuller, round face, you’re trying to create more volume on top or at least some volume on top to help offset that fullness and elongate it.
But center parts don’t allow for any volume in the very top of your hair, because they’re parted there.
The bigger problem is, depending on your texture of hair, if you’ve got a fuller texture, you’ve got a little bit of wave in your hair or especially if you have curl, then you’re going to create more fullness on the sides just naturally, because your hair is going to compound on itself.
This can compound the triangular effect and that triangular effect brings the eye down and creates more fullness through the cheeks.
I personally tend to stay away from center parts but use that knowledge to your advantage and do whatever you want.
If you’ve got curly or wavy hair, because your hair has a tendency to thicken on itself or to look a little bit denser and compound, creating a little bit more volume than straight hair, you can have a little bit more layering in the sides. You can get a little bit more aggressive with it.
Whereas you got straighter or finer straight hair, especially if you layer the sides too much, you could end up finding yourself looking very thin at the bottoms.
You do want to pay attention to that. For curly hair, I would actually recommend that you layer it a little bit more, to pull a little that bulk out of the sides, because you’re just naturally going to have more bulk on the sides.
You want to make sure that you alleviate that and create more volume on the top.
Long Hair For Round Face
When you’re talking about long hair, I’m talking about anything collarbone or longer.
I know, some of you are gonna say collarbone is not long hair. Just trust me that what I’m gonna say is true for collarbone length hair or hair down to your butt.
So before you freak out, I understand everybody’s got a different perception of long hair.
When you’re thinking about one length long hair, I know a lot of people can feel like that’s elongating and it slims.
To some extent that’s true.
One length long hair does have a tendency to draw the face out, but with that said, you also want to pay attention to different textures.
Many times, depending on what texture you have, if it’s thick, wavy, curly, something like that, or even if you’ve got finer hair texture, but a lot of it, that can have a tendency to get really full on the sides and that will bring the eye down.
Even though it’s not getting triangular so much, because it’s longer, it can still have a tendency to add a little bit more width.
But the more important part of that really has less to do with the width and more to do with the fact that it’s drawing the eye down and not actually lifting or accentuating cheek structures, which is what we want to focus on.
I always say it’s best, even with finer hair to layer it to some extent so that you have a little bit of movement, texture, and you can get the volume in areas that you want to get it to accentuate things about the face that you want to accentuate.
When you’re talking about layers, there are two different kinds of layering.
There’s layering in the front and there’s layering in the back.
Anything in the front of the ears, the face framing layers, the bangs, all of that stuff, is front layers and everything behind the ears, in the back of the head, that’s all internal layers.
The front layers, face framing layers, you want to ensure that you don’t have any length that starts directly at your chin.
You want those layers to either be above your chin or longer than your chin. That length in the chin is going to have a tendency, just like the other lengths, to add more fullness.
In the back, in the internal layering, you want to make sure that those layers are no shorter than the shortest front layer.
They either need to be as short as the shortest layer in the front or longer.
If you have them shorter, what will happen is you’re going to get some volume in the back, but it’ll end up looking like you’ve got a bob that hangs down and then this hair that kind of hangs below it. That can actually accentuate more of that fullness in your face.
One other thing that you want to think about is how much do you layer the back.
Many times people with longer hair are concerned to do too much layering. Therefore they want to leave the layers longer.
I understand that.
You definitely don’t want to cut the layers too short. If you leave the layers too long, what you’re going to find is you’re going to get all of the detriments of having layering.
You’re going to have to style them, so that you can smooth the ends out, you’re going to get a little bit less hair at the ends and it’s not going to feel quite as dense and it’s ultimately still going to be heavy and not give you the volume that you’re trying to achieve.
I always say it’s better to actually take those layers to the shorter side of whatever that length will handle and get the benefit of having layers as well.
The other thing that that’s going to do is it’s going to take some of the bulk out of the bottom. That’s going to create more volume in the top, less volume in the sides and that means that you’re going to have more elongation and less fullness through your face.
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Samantha is a hairstylist with over 12 years of color and stylist experience. She enjoys using her knowledge to create what her clients really want when they sit down in her chair. Her passion is creating unique looks that her clients feel great in.