﻿On this channel, I’ve noticed that a lot of the newer viewers
don’t really know what I’m talking about when I use anatomical terms like jaw ramus,
zygomatic bone or mandible body and partially this is because I’ve taken for granted what I expect
people to already know since we’ve covered it on the channel in the past.
In this new series, we’re going to bring back an old series called defining beauty,
but in a more newbie friendly format, so that you can revise what you already know or learn a thing
or two and see how certain anatomical features on your face affect your facial appeal greatly.
For this episode, we’re going to be covering the jaw ramus and how it affects your aesthetic.
What is the ramus? The ramus or rami in plural is the
bone formation that joins the lower jaw (mandible) to the rest of the skull. The reason why a tall
and defined ramus is important is because of its shape and positioning it essentially acts
as a lever arm for bite force on your face. Your masseter muscles, which are responsible for the up
and down movement of your jaw aren’t strong enough on their own to cut through all the tough foods
your ancestors would have been eating. For this we need what’s known as a mechanical advantage,
to amplify the force your bite muscles put out. Quick physics here, your masseter
muscles contract when you want to bite and the entire lower jaw revolves around this hinge
here at the head of the mandible. The further away the force is being applied from the hinge,
the longer the lever arm is and thus the greater the amplification effect, just like a see-saw.
The lever arm in this case is the ramus, and you can imagine how well defined jaws usually have a
longer ramus and a bit of slope to increase the lever arm. Recessed faces on the other hand have
a short and near vertical ramus and so the force is being applied very close to the hinge and the
bite force is relatively lower and weaker. This is significant because much of our facial development
early on is due to the forces we place on it, such as from our diets as we covered here, using
the works of Dr Weston Price. Your body doesn’t need as much mechanical force if you’re consuming
a soft diet during puberty and adolescence or if you’re always mouth breathing, and so the
lower jaw’s development is shrunk, and the ramus is both short and vertical which isn’t ideal.
From a biomechanical point of view, a 45 degree angle, aka a diagonal ramus angle would be best at
maximising this mechanical advantage because it’s furthest away from the hinge and gives you enough
height and clearance to chew properly. A more sloped ramus, say past this 45 degree theoretical
best, also leads to reducing mechanical advantage, and women tend to have more of these sloped shapes
compared to men with square, sloped jaws which is partially why their bite force is lower too.
Can I Change The Ramus? Surprisingly you can but not
exactly the ramus by itself. Bone can remodel itself but its dependant on so many factors.
Fom Huumonen et al, Longitudinal studies have shown that remodelling of the mandibular bone
occurs with age, Age and systemic factors as well as loss of teeth may change the gonial angle.
Health related factors like Rheumatoid disease can modify the bony structures of the mandible too.
Saleh and colleagues tells us that masticatory forces exerted are different for males and
females, which influence the shape and the size of the mandibular ramus. In simple terms,
men have square jaws because they bite harder and vice versa. This is very much a chicken or the egg
problem because squarer jaws also allow you to bite harder as a result so what came first? The
most noticeable change in ramus, in my opinion, comes from edentulous individuals. If you have
your teeth all intact, you are considered dentate, and if they have all fallen out, such as with age,
then you are edentulous. As you can imagine, not having any teeth completely changes the
biomechanics of your jaw and what would once close with a perfect seal because of your teeth,
now has to extend the lower jaw further to close properly. From the study, ramus height changed
by a mm for both men and women and while this may not seem significant, the bigger, more noticeable
changes were to the gonial angle. This term will get its own episode soon, but for now,
it’s the angle of your jaw at a point known as the gonion which we’ll talk about in a second.
A higher gonial angle is more feminine, with studies listing 135 degrees and above as feminine
and 130 and below as masculine. In all cases of edentulousness, which is often associated with old
age and weakening masseter muscles, the jaw angle increases supporting the idea that the ramus does
strongly influence or is influenced by the bite force being applied to it. It adapts. If you want
a stronger, more masculine jaw, chew harder foods and give your body a reason to use it,
but understand this is a lifelong change of lifelong effort, not a once a day exercise you do.
We spoke about this indepth on the Glow Up podcast which is a podcast
dedicated to actual advice you can follow. Going back to Saleh and colleague they found the
median ramus height to be 8.6 (7.93-9.03)cm for men and 7.28 (6.88-7.74)cm for women. Mind you,
I’m giving you these values here, which is the condylar ramus height,
meaning that it goes straight into the socket that lets your jaw move. The ramus is one of those
facial characteristics where the average value is typically the most preferred or attractive
and granted that this is an Egyptian study, the values are more or less similar around the world
because it’s a small part of your face anyway. We can also predict one’s age from their ramus,
which is useful in forensics when all you have left is the skeleton, or even just the jaw.
Taking an average ramus height of say 8cm, we can plug it into the formula for a male
getting a predicted age of 34, which is close to the actual age of the average of the sample they
used in this group. It’s easy to understand how a young boy would have a ramus height much smaller
than a grown man. We can also predict sex from the ramus height, using a similar function. Where if
your values from the formula are around 0.681 then your ramus is more masculine, and if its
around -0.831 than its more feminine. How this affects your facial aesthetic
Now that you know the basics of why the ramus exists, what the average expected values for
it are and how it can possibly change, let’s talk about how this affects your facial aesthetic. Here
is a morph of a girl with a normal side profile of average ramus length and jaw angle, and here
is her with a shorter ramus. It definitely makes the jawline appear sharper and more svelte, but
it is a feminising characteristic. Remember all those numbers we went over, women on average had
lower ramus lengths and higher gonial angles than men, and so, as we reduce the ramus length here,
it adds youthfulness and femininity to the face, going back so far to that of a young girl. Do
the reverse and the face is masculinized very greatly. With men on the other hand, it works
to their advantage in making the jaw larger and more imposing, which is obviously a dimorphic aka
masculine characteristic, within limit of course. There are few nuances to this which might be a bit
much for a newbie entry video, but lets touch on them anyway. If you want to catch the rest of this
series, then please do subscribe. Firstly, notice how on this young man, we can see
the shadow of his jaw gonion. Quick recap, the jaw gonion is this anatomical region of the jaw,
and if your jaw is very wide it will pull the skin on the sides tightly, assuming you are also lean.
Being able to see the ramus is a big part of the attractiveness of the jawline,
and we’ve covered this in many of our videos on the side profile.
Having the shadow be visible is the difference between a round, puffy face that is seen as
cute at best compared to a sharp angular face that is seen as hot, striking or sensual
and this applies for both men and women. The little shadows we see on a face reveal crucial
depth perception characteristics that make the face appear angular and lean, even if you are not
necessarily lean in terms of bodyfat. They also subtly indicate healthy dentofacial development,
as the shadow we see here is really only visible if your jaw is properly developed
enough to pull the skin tightly. A recessed jaw has virtually no shadows and is a soft,
concave shape with no angles. The ramus border is invisible, there are no jawline shadows
and the face is overall very flat. An angular, developed face, regardless of lighting conditions
will almost always have this ramus shadow because the region is notably sunken in for most people
as it sits behind the most laterally wide part of the jaw. If you’re wondering why your face looks
soft and smooth, one of the most common ways we can explain this to the patients who come to us
for an assessment is by adding shadows to their existing bone structure in Photoshop. This is an
exaggerated example to show you how shadows change jawline definition in photoshop. In the original
her jaw gonion is very flat and virtually non existent, hence it has no bordering shadow, but by
adding it back in with Photoshop, the definition is very clear to see and we’ve essentially created
a feature that wasn't there originally. After this video you’ll start to notice that the
length of the ramus, it’s slope and angle and the shadow it produces are very much one of the key
features for an attractive jaw. We’ll cover the remainder of the featues in the future episodes
of this series of Facial Aesthetics 101. If you would like to get your face assessed,
to learn about whether you have a masculine or feminine ramus, your jaw angles and how they
affect your face or just get an indepth look into your face order a QOVES facial evaluation over at
our website, performed by our in-house team of doctors and dentists to help you achieve that
next big glow-up. As always follow us on Instagram for bite-sized content and subscribe on youtube.