Taking it on the chin: meet the new holy grail of beauty

A sculpted or snatched’ jawline has swelled the ranks of impossible standards to live up to, bemoans Katie Rosseinsky

- Katie Rosseinsky

In 2006, the legendary writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron was, to borrow the title of the book she released that year, feeling bad about her neck. The perceived decline of this particular part of the body was a real tell-tale sign of ageing, Ephron believed. But if she was around to muse on beauty culture in 2025, I’m pretty sure she would have honed in a little higher up, with her (self) critical gaze landing somewhere around the mandible bone that lends shape to our lower faces and chins. Because right now, I feel pretty bad about my jawline. And I’m certainly not the only one.

A defined jawline has been a desirable physical trait for decades, even centuries. Just think of the square-jawed hunks of Old Hollywood, the angular beauty of Katharine Hepburn, or, for a few more contemporary examples, Angelina Jolie’s exquisite bone structure and Bella Hadid’s striking features. For as long as I’ve been aware of what’s deemed beautiful (aka ever since I was a young girl listening in on older women bemoaning their appearances), I’ve had it drilled into me that a double chin was something to try and avoid. I’m someone who is naturally round of face, so this particular flaw was always my personal neurosis; photos in which I had any wobbliness around the jawline would get deleted (or at least detagged).

But over the past five years or so, a so-called “snatched” jaw – to parrot a TikTok-friendly phrase that was in turn borrowed from drag culture – seems to have become a universal holy grail of beauty. It’s now an undeniable aesthetic status symbol – or, alternatively, just the latest impossible aesthetic ideal for us to castigate ourselves for failing to embody. My ever-present but mostly dormant fixation has re-emerged, because perfectly sculpted jawlines, plus a whole load of beauty treatments, surgical and non-surgical fixes and deeply dubious hacks promising fast results, are everywhere.