Gonial angle: a side-profile measurement, not a front-facing one.

Gonial angle — also called the mandibular angle — is the angle formed where the lower border of the jawbone meets the back edge of the ramus, at the corner of the jaw below the ear:

• Sharper, more acute angle — the jaw corner reads as more defined.
• Wider, more obtuse angle — the jaw corner reads as softer.

It's an angle formed by bone structure, not a distance and not a size in absolute units — and unlike most of the ratios discussed on this site, it's read from the side of the face, not the front.

The corner gonial angle describes sits on the depth axis of the face — the same axis a straight-on camera view foreshortens the most:

• A full-frontal shot compresses the jaw corner toward the outline of the face, where the actual angle isn't visible.
• Reading it requires a genuine side or three-quarter profile view, where the jaw's turn from under the cheek up toward the ear is actually visible in frame.

That's a different camera-setup problem from the pitch/roll/turn sensitivities covered in the full breakdown of why face-rating scores swing between scans — those are about holding a front-facing angle steady; this is about needing a different angle entirely.

Mogalytics does not compute or display a separate gonial angle number. Its six-measurement composite reads live from a front-facing camera feed, and the closest measurement in the same jaw family is:

• Jaw ratio — jaw height relative to total face height, read from the front rather than the side.

Jaw ratio and gonial angle both describe the jaw, but they're not the same measurement — one is a height proportion read frontally, the other is a corner angle read in profile. Mogalytics makes no claim of parity between the two, or with any other site's specific gonial angle calculation.

Gonial angle is part of the same jaw-and-lower-face family as two of the six measurements Mogalytics tracks. If you're auditing the rest:

• Jaw ratio — the closest camera-read analog, sensitive to chin pitch rather than profile angle.
• Cheekbone ratio — a width-only measurement with its own angle sensitivity.
• Facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) — another widely searched proportion Mogalytics doesn't compute directly.
• How does Omoggle's scoring work? — the publicly described mechanics this term shows up in.