Mewing before and after: what those photos really show

Most mewing before and after photos aren't showing you what you think. In almost every convincing pair, the things that actually changed are body fat, camera angle, lighting, and whether the chin was tucked or pushed forward — not the jawbone. Tongue posture can't move an adult's fused facial skeleton, so whatever improvement you're looking at is coming from levers that work on their own, with or without the tongue.

If you've spent time in looksmaxxing threads, you've scrolled hundreds of these. Two panels, "3 months of mewing," a jaw that looks noticeably sharper on the right. It's persuasive. It's also, almost every time, a demonstration of good photography and a leaner face wearing a mewing label. Let's take the pairs apart honestly — because the honest version is actually more useful to you than the fantasy.

What are you really seeing in a mewing before and after?

You're seeing four variables move at once, and none of them is bone. A typical "after" photo is a leaner face, shot at a better angle, in better light, with the chin extended and the neck open. Change those four things on any face and the jaw looks sharper — no tongue required. The mewing is the caption, not the cause.

Here's the thing the format hides: a before/after is only honest if everything except the one variable stays fixed. These pairs fix nothing. The "before" is usually a bad candid — head tilted down, phone held low, soft indoor light, relaxed posture, and often ten pounds heavier. The "after" is a deliberate shot. Once you know what to look for, you can't unsee it.

The four things doing the actual work:

• Body fat. This is the big one. Submental fat — the pad under the chin — is what blurs a jawline. Lose it and the jaw reads as a clean line from ear to chin. That is a body-composition change, and it happens whether you mew or not.
• Head angle. Tilt your chin down and everyone gets a double chin and a soft jaw. Level the head, or lift the chin a few degrees, and the mandible edge separates from the neck. Same face, same day, wildly different jawline.
• Lighting. Flat overhead or harsh downward light in the "before" fills the jaw with shadow. Side light or window light in the "after" carves the bone out. Photographers do this on purpose; looksmaxxers discovered it by accident.
• Chin protrusion. People literally push their jaw forward for the "after" — jutting the chin, tensing the neck. It's a pose, held for a fraction of a second. It looks like structure. It's a muscle.

Which changes are the photo, and which are the tongue?

The honest split is stark: the camera did almost everything, and the tongue did almost nothing. Below is what's actually moving in a convincing before/after versus what mewing is credited with. The gap between the two columns is the whole story.

What changed in the photo	What mewing supposedly did	The honest read
Lower body fat, less submental pad	"Tongue pressure sharpened the jaw"	Fat loss sharpens jaws; it works on everyone, mewing or not
Chin lifted / head level	"Maxilla moved forward"	An adult maxilla doesn't move from tongue posture; the angle changed
Side or window light	"Better bone definition"	Light reveals structure that was always there
Chin jutted, neck tensed	"New jaw structure"	That's a pose held for the shutter, not a permanent change
Months of also lifting and cutting	"Months of mewing"	The confound: the same months built the real result

Read that last row twice, because it's the trap. Someone spends six months mewing. In those same six months they also start lifting, clean up their diet, drop body fat, and — because they're now paying attention to their face — learn to photograph it. Every one of those does something real. Mewing is the only one that gets the credit, purely because it's the one they were told mattered.

Can tongue posture actually reshape an adult's jaw?

There's no whitelist-grade evidence that it can. Mewing — the idea, named after orthodontist Mike Mew, of resting the whole tongue against the roof of the mouth to reshape the jaw over time — asks a fused adult skull to remodel from a force it isn't built to remodel from. By adulthood the facial sutures are closed. Light, sustained tongue pressure is not a mechanism that moves that bone.

This matters because it decides where the improvement in any real before/after has to come from. If the bone can't have moved, then a sharper jaw in the "after" is — by elimination — soft tissue, posture, angle, and light. There's no fifth option hiding in the tongue. We walk through the mechanism and the evidence in full in does mewing work, and unpack the original claim in what is mewing.

To be fair to the practice: resting your tongue on your palate is harmless, and decent oral resting posture is a reasonable habit. The problem isn't the tongue on the roof of the mouth. The problem is the before/after culture selling that habit as bone surgery you can do for free.

So is the jawline improvement real or fake?

Often the improvement is completely real — it's just misattributed. The guy in the "after" genuinely does look better. His jaw genuinely is sharper. What's false is the label on it. He didn't grow bone; he lost the fat that was hiding the bone he already had, and he learned to shoot it. That's good news, because it means the result is repeatable — through the lever that actually caused it.

This is the part looksmaxxing gets exactly backwards. It treats the jawline as a bone problem you solve with tongue placement, when for the median man a defined jawline is mostly a body-fat outcome. Submental fat is the thing standing between you and the jaw in the "after" photo — not a maxilla that refused to move forward. Drop that fat and the same transformation happens, minus the years of pressing your tongue up and hoping.

If you want to see your own face fairly instead of through a flattering pose, the trick is to remove the variables the before/after exploits: level head, flat even light, relaxed neutral expression, no chin-jut. What do I actually look like is a full guide to shooting yourself honestly, and it's the exact opposite of how an "after" photo is staged.

Key numbers

• People form a stable read of a face — attractive, trustworthy, dominant — in about 100 milliseconds, and longer looks barely change it (Willis & Todorov, 2006). A single frozen "after" jaw angle isn't what a real person is reacting to.
• A large review pooling eleven meta-analyses found strong agreement, within and across cultures, on who reads as attractive — judged on the whole face at once, not by scoring an isolated jaw or tongue-posture "gain" (Langlois et al., 2000).
• People pull accurate impressions from a few silent seconds of expressive behavior (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992) — motion, warmth, presence. None of it is captured by a still-photo jawline you posed for.
• Facial sutures are fused in adults, which is the anatomical reason light tongue pressure has no established path to remodel the jawbone — so the change in a real before/after is soft tissue and staging, not bone.

What is the before/after industry actually selling?

It's selling the feeling that a fixed feature is fixable for free. A before/after photo is the most persuasive format on the internet: it looks like proof, it's emotionally loaded, and it skips every confounding variable. Attach it to a habit that costs nothing and can't be disproven quickly, and you have a perfect engine for hope. That's the product. Not a jaw.

Here's where I'll say plainly that the forums are wrong. The dominant story — mew for long enough and your bone structure reorganizes, and here are the pictures to prove it — mistakes a photography-and-fat-loss result for a skeletal one. It sends men to spend months on the one variable that can't have caused the change, while treating the variables that did (body fat, posture, light, grooming) as afterthoughts or "cope." That's backwards, and it costs people time they'll never audit, because the format never invites them to.

And there's a quieter cost. The before/after frames your face as a project with a bone-shaped bottleneck, which keeps you comparing your worst candid to a stranger's best-staged shot. Real people don't experience you as a frozen front-on frame. They meet a moving, lit, expressive face in about a tenth of a second (Willis & Todorov, 2006) — the version of you a before/after can't photograph, because it isn't a pose.

What if you want a real before and after?

You can have one — a genuinely dramatic one — if you point the effort at what actually moves the face. The levers that produce every convincing "after" are known, controllable, and boring, which is exactly why they work. None of them is your tongue.

If you want the transformation the photos promise, here's the real order of operations:

1. Lose the submental fat. For most men this single change does more for the jawline than anything else. The face leans out before the body does — cheekbones and jaw read first.
2. Fix your resting head posture. A chronically tucked chin flattens your jaw in every photo and in person. Level the head; let the neck lengthen.
3. Learn to shoot yourself in honest light. Flat, even, front light. No downward phone angle. This alone closes half the gap between your "before" and a stranger's "after."
4. Groom the frame. A defined beard line, a real haircut, and a rested face (sleep, less salt and alcohol) do visible work on the jaw and eye area — no bone required.

Do those and take two photos three months apart under identical conditions. That's a before/after you can trust, because you controlled the variables the internet version hides. When you want an outside read instead of your own biased eye, the free test tells you how your face actually lands in the first second — and whether your jawline is really your ceiling or just a photo problem.

The bottom line

A mewing before and after almost never shows what it claims. Strip the pair down and you find lower body fat, a level head instead of a tucked chin, better light, and a jaw jutted for the shutter — four real changes, none of them bone, all of them working with or without a tongue on the palate. An adult skull is fused; there's no whitelist-grade evidence tongue posture reshapes it, so by elimination the improvement in any honest pair is soft tissue and staging (Willis & Todorov, 2006; Langlois et al., 2000).

Which is genuinely good news. The result those photos promise is real and repeatable — it just runs through body composition, posture, light, and grooming, not months of pressing your tongue up and waiting on bone that won't move. Keep the relaxed tongue posture if you like; it's harmless. But if you want the jaw in the "after," go get lean and learn to shoot it. When you want an honest read instead of a flattering pose, take the test — it reads the first second the way a real person does, no protractor and no caption.

Worth reading next: does mewing work and what is mewing.

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Studies referenced: Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598. Langlois, J. H., et al. (2000). Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 126(3), 390–423. Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences. Psychological Bulletin, 111(2), 256–274.