Squaring Off

The humble mandible is actually critical to facial appeal or so an abundance of new tools and procedures would have it. Mattie Kahn puts them to the test.

- Mattie Kahn

Not long ago, the plastic surgeon Sam Rizk, MD, had a prospective patient come in for a consultation. Rizk aims to please; he sees solutions where others see weak chins. But then the patient showed him her ideal visage—a series of snapshots filtered into anatomical impossibilities.

“I was like, ‘You know, there are certain things under the jawline that are necessary for survival,’” he explains. “‘The windpipe? You need that to breathe.’” He could not give her what she wanted—not if she wanted to be able to keep chewing her food. (She did.)

America is now in the grips of a jaws craze not seen since the summer of 1975 when a killer shark was on the loose off the shores of New England. Amazon peddles thousands of products that promise to tone and snatch. Instagram brims with gua sha tutorials and med-spa interventions. TikTok videos tout the benefits of “mewing”—a questionable practice that promises a fierce jawline to those who rest their tongues on the roof of their mouths. At the recent Alex Katz retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at least one well-heeled patron could be overheard taking notes: “There isn’t a loose jowl in the whole show!”