How to soften a double chin with posing.

What the camera is actually doing.

The area between the chin and the throat is soft tissue over no bone. In life it is seen in motion, from wherever the person you are talking to happens to be standing. In a photograph it is flattened into two dimensions, held still, seen from one fixed height and lit from one direction, so the camera draws one continuous shape unless something creates an edge.

Then three things typically make it worse, and all three are outside your face:

• A lens below eye level, pointing up into the whole underside of the jaw. This is the single largest cause, and it is why phone photographs are so much worse than any other kind.
• A lens too close, magnifying whatever is nearest and stretching the lower face forward.
• Flat light from the camera's own direction, filling the shadow that would separate jaw from neck.

So a great deal of what reads as a fact about a face is really a fact about a phone held at chest height, eighteen inches away, under a light directly overhead. Change those three and much of it changes with them. The rest of this page is what your body can do once they have.

Fix one: get the lens up.

First, because it outranks everything else. No posing rescues a photograph taken from below.

Slightly above eye level is the target. From there the lens is looking along the top of the jaw instead of up into the space beneath it, which is the whole area in question. An inch or two above your eye line is enough; far higher distorts the head instead.

In practice this means asking, because nobody volunteers it. Ask whoever is holding the phone to lift it to their own eye line or above, and to step back rather than lean in. On your own, get the phone onto a shelf or a stack of books at the right height. A propped camera at eye level beats a hand held phone at chest height every time, however well you pose in the second one.

The full logic of camera height, distance and the turn is set out in the guide to angles that flatter, if you want to know why this one variable carries so much.

Fix two: forward, then down.

Now the body. Push your forehead toward the camera so the head travels forward on the neck, then lower the chin a fraction. Forward, then down. Never up.

It works by geometry rather than by anything happening to you: the skin between jaw and throat has a longer path to cover, so the slack goes out of it, and the tilt takes the underside out of the lens's view. Together they do more than any other adjustment available to you.

The instinct runs the other way. Told to fix this area almost everyone lifts, which aims the soft underside straight at the camera and adds the nostrils, and if you have ever tried to help yourself in a photograph and made it worse, that is what happened.

The margin is small and personal, and it shifts with camera height and with whatever is around your neck. Finding your own amount, and releasing the jaw tension that undoes it, is the whole subject of jawline and chin posing. Learn it there and come back here for the rest of the stack.

Fix three: the turn, and the long side.

Straight on is the hardest presentation of this area: the camera sees the full width of jaw and neck at once, with nothing to break it up.

Turn your body away, let your weight settle onto the rear foot, and rotate your face back to the lens. As the head rotates, the near jaw is seen along its length rather than across its width, which reads as a line rather than a mass. Even a modest turn changes it noticeably.

Two refinements make the turn work harder. Drop the near shoulder slightly, because a raised one shortens the neck. And grow tall through the top of your head rather than the chest, which recovers the neck length that slouching quietly removes.

Posture is doing more here than you would guess. Rounding forward drags the head backward on the neck and collapses the whole area, so two photographs a minute apart can look completely different. Stand tall first, then move forward and down from there rather than from a slump.

Fix four: the tongue, and other small levers.

A few small mechanical tricks stack on top of the big three. None replaces camera height, and together they are worth real ground.

• The tongue. Press the flat of it against the roof of your mouth, just behind your top teeth, and hold while the frame is taken. It engages the floor of the mouth so the area under the chin reads firmer in the frame, and nobody can see you doing it.
• Breathe out first. An exhale drops the shoulders, lengthens the neck and gives the forward and down move more room.
• Do not clench. A gripped jaw sets the mouth into a line, so a correct position can still photograph as braced. Let the back teeth come apart a few millimeters.
• Give your hands something to do: a hand clamped against a hip tips that shoulder up and shortens the neck.

Try them one at a time. Six simultaneous adjustments make you look exactly as busy as that sounds, which is the real limit of any checklist; the wider version of that sits in the guide to how to pose at a first photoshoot, where nerves and being directed are the subject.

What you wear, and where the light falls.

The first is what is on your neck. A high collar buttoned to the top sits exactly where the jaw line needs space. An open neckline gives the eye a longer vertical run and lets the jaw read against skin rather than fabric. A heavy scarf adds bulk in the one place you would rather it did not. That subject is worked out in necklines that flatter in headshots.

The second is light. Flat light from the camera's own direction fills every shadow, including the one that separates jaw from neck. Light from slightly to one side and above puts a shadow under the jawbone, and that shadow draws the edge. You cannot carry good light around, but you can move: turn so the source sits off to one side and above rather than behind the camera.

Hair is the quiet third factor. Hair falling forward along the jaw shortens the visible line; hair pushed back or worn up lengthens the neck. Neither is better. It is worth knowing which one you have brought.

The honest limit of all this.

Posing is geometry. It changes the angle, the distance and the tension in a piece of tissue, and so changes what a lens records. It removes nothing and it is not a promise about your particular face. Anyone telling you a pose will make part of you disappear is overselling a genuinely useful tool.

Second: this is not a flaw and you are not the exception. It is soft tissue where everybody has soft tissue, rendered flat by a device that sees one angle. If a photograph has made you feel it is the first thing anyone notices about you, that is the photograph talking.

Third: retouching is a separate question, and it should be. Images are retouched by hand, and what that does and does not mean is set out in the guide to retouching. Posing happens in camera before any of it.

And if what actually brought you here is that you have been putting off a picture you need, that is a different problem, answered in the guide to camera anxiety and what a directed session does about it.

Putting the stack in order.

The whole stack in order, strongest first.

• Get the lens to eye level or above, and further away than feels necessary.
• Stand or sit tall, then let your shoulders drop on an exhale.
• Turn your body away from the camera and bring your face back toward it.
• Push your forehead forward, then lower your chin a fraction.
• Drop the near shoulder, keep daylight at the elbow, unclench the jaw.
• Add the tongue against the roof of the mouth for the frame itself.
• Reset between frames, because a held position collects tension in exactly this area.

In a session none of that is yours to run. The camera height is set for the crop, the light is placed so the shadow under the jaw does its job, and the position is rebuilt every time you change looks, sit down or turn. The rest of the mechanics across the whole body are in how to pose for photos, and it is why a professional headshot made this way looks like you on a good day rather than a picture you hope nobody enlarges.