Mewing: what it claims, and what the evidence actually says.

Mewing is resting the tongue flat against the roof of the mouth (the hard palate) rather than letting it sit low. It's named after British orthodontist John Mew, who along with his son Mike Mew promoted the practice under the label "orthotropics" — the claim that sustained tongue posture, applied consistently over months or years, reshapes the jawline and lower face.

It's a technique someone does, not a trait or a measurement, which sets it apart from every ratio or angle covered elsewhere on this site.

• A 2019 commentary in the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery reviewed mewing in direct response to its social-media popularity and found no controlled clinical evidence that it reshapes an adult jaw.
• John Mew was delicensed by the UK General Dental Council in 2019 for professional misconduct tied to these claims — not a neutral fact, and one worth weighing against any single testimonial or before/after post.
• Professional orthodontic bodies that have publicly addressed the trend describe it as unsupported for reshaping bone structure in a fully grown adult, whatever role tongue posture may or may not play earlier in childhood development.

None of that means every person claiming a visible change is lying — camera angle, lighting, weight change, and posture can all shift how a jawline photographs, which is exactly the kind of variable the accuracy breakdown on this site covers for face-rating readings generally. It does mean a single before/after pair isn't evidence of a structural change, controlled tongue posture or otherwise.

Mogalytics does not generate improvement plans, technique advice, or before/after coaching of any kind — it reads six geometry ratios live from a front-facing camera feed, settled over a 30-frame trimmed mean. The closest measurement to what mewing claims to change is:

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

Mogalytics makes no claim about whether mewing changes jaw ratio, gonial angle, or any other measurement — it simply gives you a consistent, repeatable number to compare over time if you're already tracking a change from any source, the same way it's built for testing a camera or presentation change.

• Jaw ratio — the closest camera-read measurement to the trait mewing claims to change.
• Gonial angle — another jaw-corner term Mogalytics doesn't compute directly.
• Why scores swing between scans — the camera and pose variables that can make a jawline look different without any structural change.
• Chin-to-philtrum ratio — another lower-face proportion in the same family.