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Mouth Widening Guide
Make your mouth wider!
Why is mouth width important?Make your mouth wider!
Like every other facial feature, the mouth needs to be of a certain dimensions and be proportional to the whole of the face in order to make it harmonious.
The things that determine if you have a good mouth area are: lips shape, lips size and mouth width.
A wide mouth is a dimorphic trait, wide mouths are more preferable than narrow ones.
“The width of the mouth correlates with perceived leadership ability and actual leadership performance”
The big man has a big mouth: Mouth width correlates with perceived leadership ability and actual leadership performance
Previous studies have found that facial appearance can predict both the selection and performance of leaders. Little is known about the specific facia…
Case in point, observe how this man looks better morphed with a wider mouth.
How wide should the mouth be?
The width of the mouth should be around 1.5 ~ 1.6 times the width of the nose (alar base width).
This only applies if your nose width is within the average range for males.
3D Facial Norms Database
FaceBase is the primary data resource for craniofacial researchers worldwide.
www.facebase.org
Mouth width measurements for comparison:
3D Facial Norms Database
FaceBase is the primary data resource for craniofacial researchers worldwide.
www.facebase.org
Example of the measurement in Sean O'Pry:
Examples of wide mouths:
Male model Sean O'Pry morphed with a slightly wider mouth (amongst other things):
How to make the mouth wider
There are 3 possible ways to widen the mouth:
- Lateral commisuroplasty:
Techniques in Mouth Widening Surgery - Explore Plastic Surgery
Mouth widening surgery is a variation of a vermilion advancement procedure done on the corners of the mouth.exploreplasticsurgery.comHow Is Mouth Widening Surgery Done? - Plastic Surgeon | Dr. Barry L. Eppley, MD
Mouth widening surgery (lateral commissuroplasty) can enlarge a small mouth so it is horizontally wider.
www.eppleyplasticsurgery.com
Some results of Eppley patients who underwent this procedure:
- Mouth Stretchings:
You could utilize a microstomia prevention splint or make your own mouth expander device like this:
Is there any way to make my mouth wider?
Answer (1 of 8): Yes there is. There are effective methods both surgical and non-surgical to successfully widen the relaxed width your mouth. Why would you want to do this? Are there any tangible reasons why a wider mouth might make your life better in some way? It turns out there are surprisi...www.quora.com
Detailed Guide
The idea here is to stretch the mouth in such a way that the lips vermillion (skin) doesn’t tear, but instead gradually thickens and adjusts to being stretched wider than normal so that a greater width can be maintained without conscious effort. A very positive long-term benefit of the stretching techniques I will describe is a greatly reduced or totally cured tendency toward chapped lips.This is a challenge because the human mouth is surrounded by one of the most forgiving and stretchable muscles in the body, the orbicularis oris. It’s basically a sphincter that forms an unbroken loop around a normal mouth. That’s why it’s possible to form your lips into the tiny circle needed for whistling, then open wide during a yawn to over twice the width and height of your normally relaxed mouth size.
What you need to do is to stretch this muscle, and the neighboring cheek muscles, beyond your normal maximum width that you can achieve with just cheek and lips muscles efforts alone. That will require a horizontal lips stretcher, the most familiar method being a splint.
The object is to force (without tearing!!!) your orbiculus oris muscle to stretch beyond its normal limit and get the adjoining cheek muscles to adapt to the greater desired width. This will require lots of smiling and other expression efforts while wearing the splint (you may not see much actual movement at first, but in time you will see it as your cheek muscles adapt to the mouth opening being much closer than usual to where the muscles insert into cheekbones, etc. by shortening somewhat, but not losing their maximum stretches) This won’t be very comfortable, but if you’re motivated, you’ll push through the most painful first few days and gradually start to see results.
The above splint and muscles pictures are from “Microstomia Treatment & Management” by Homere Al Moutran, MD, and Arlen D. Meyers, MD, MBA.
This is what you’re up against (another type of splint). Those loose-looking muscles over the person’s stretched mouth below will in time straighten out as their relaxed length shortens some, allowing a larger overall range of motion. There are a good number of accessory muscles that will need to be exercised and stretched for this to work (see picture below this one).
I developed my own mouth stretching apparatus and used it successfully to widen my mouth somewhat.
Edit (6/22/19). Due to increased interest I am now showing my favorite mouth stretcher design. This mouth stretching brace uses perforated springy semi-rigid stainless steel sheets. It takes into account the need to have something to stretch my mouth, some tabs on the ends to stabilize and hold the ends in my lateral commissures, and a wide portion where my entire upper and lower lips are supported in a stretched natural curvature. The other splint designs require you to manually hold your mouth wide with sustained conscious effort, limiting the time that you can wear the splint to what your muscles can endure.
My “10 cm” mouth brace uses blue electrical tape to spread the pressure over a wider area, and my “11 cm” mouth brace uses sports mouth guard silicone to soften its end edges. The perforations permit normal breathing and somewhat coherent speech while the brace is being worn.
Here’s what they look like.
Please excuse the so-so quality of my selfie. I’m 57 and not a model. This shows what the 10 cm one it looks like worn properly. I can wear this for a couple of hours or the 11 cm one for maybe 20 minutes before removing it due to discomfort. The most important thing to notice about my appliance is that you do not need to keep your cheek muscles tensed up to keep it from popping out of your mouth like other splints might. Your lips themselves hold the appliance in place. This way the only limit on how long you can wear it is the need to relieve discomfort from an extreme stretch or to eat or talk normally.
If anyone wants something like this, let me know. You will need a series with 0.5 to 1.0 cm increments wider as your mouth stretching progresses. I’m not doing this for profit, but instead I have gone to the trouble of describing my methods because I think wider mouths look beautiful and I want to see more people enjoying both the visual and practical aspects of having them—and I know my appliance works.
My mouth used to be between 4.5 and 5 cm wide when relaxed and closed and is now 6 cm wide. My maximum smile width used to be about 7.5 cm wide and is now 9+ cm (10+ for a couple of hours immediately after a stretching session) with muscular efforts alone. To get this result I had to gradually work my way up from 9 cm forced stretches (the effort hurt, especially at first!) to now 12 cm wide with very little pain (if it hurts, I stop—I have learned to heed the warnings my body makes). I can still whistle, so I haven’t injured anything. This took about six months of serious effort and my designing and testing several novel apparatuses on myself to achieve this (other models involve stainless steel hooks or headgear).
I’m starting to get my own wraparound smile, though I also need to drop about 40–50 pounds so my thick cheeks stop getting in the way (picture from 6/22/19).
My most recent trip to the dentist with my more stretchable mouth resulted in the easiest teeth cleaning I’ve ever had, and I can now open my mouth much wider for singing without cheek cramps. It’s not just for looks alone I did this. I haven’t had chapped lips at all (I guess the stretching toughened them up) this year, either. Finally, to my pleasant surprise, I have not acquired additional wrinkles around my mouth and face (I’m 55).
This requires time and commitment, and like you having to wear a retainer daily for the rest of your life after orthodontic treatment, you may have to do a daily mouth stretch to maintain the desired final width of your mouth.
Update 12/30/18: One of the most amazing positive side-effects of my own mouth stretching regimen is I have not had chapped lips in two years. I used to get painful and sometimes bleeding chapped lips every winter several times a month, and even sometimes in other seasons—even with regular use of chapstick. A lot of this had to do with living in semi-arid, low-humidity southern Idaho. I still live in southern Idaho, but my mouth stretching has toughened up my lips’ vermilion enough that I can sing and widely smile all I want to even in the winter without fear of painfully splitting my lips, and I almost never use chapstick anymore. The only exception now is for sunscreen protection while surface-mining opal or spending a lot of time on sunlit snow.
Even if the stretching regimen doesn’t result in you getting a much wider mouth, curing your lips’ tendencies toward painful chapping is likely worth the regular horizontal mouth stretching all by itself.
Another person who'd answered this question more recently has a very good idea on how to compensate for mouths returning to normal size despite frequent stretches. It's the use of injectable lips fillers on the lateral portions of the lips, possibly augmented by fat injections later on to make it permanent. After your lips are toughened up by regular daily stretches beyond the ideal relaxed width you want, you can partially stretch your mouth a bit beyond your ideal, get the injections, and your mouth will naturally relax wider than before.
Let's say you have a 5 cm wide mouth and 5 cm wide nose and want your mouth to nose width ratio to be near the Golden Ratio (1.618..), meaning a mouth about 8 cm wide. Stretch beyond 10 cm if you can to toughen up the lips vermillion against splits and chapping. Then more lightly stretch your mouth with some sort of splint to about 8.5 cm wide while receiving the lateral lips injections, the extra 0.5 cm to compensate for inevitable shrinkage. For a time (not sure how long) you'll have a 7.5–8 cm wide mouth to 'test drive' so you'll know if you like the look or not, especially if you're considering the surgical option.
If you feel you just cannot handle the discomfort and commitment of daily forcing your mouth beyond its normal width, there is the plastic surgery option. When completely healed, your wider mouth will not require stretching to maintain its new width—except perhaps a little to keep scars from causing contractures.
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This is a microstomia prevention splint:
This is the only microstomia prevention splint available online to buy I could find, it's a bit expensive:
Facial Flex - Adult Microstomia Prevention Appliance-CR4050
www.craniorehab.com
- Palate expanders:
Mouth width can be estimated from the intercanine width so increasing the intercanine distance through a palate expander could result in an increase of the mouth width.
However, unless your palate is really narrow, you probably will not see a significant increase in mouth width through palate expansion.
Predicting mouth width from inter-canine width - A 75% rule | Request PDF
Request PDF | Predicting mouth width from inter-canine width - A 75% rule | It has been suggested that inter-canine width plus 57% of the cumulative distance between the lateral aspect of the canines and the pupil centers... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
www.researchgate.net
Full PDF
- Alar Base reduction:
A nose that is too wide could make your mouth look narrower than what it really is.
- Lip reduction:
Lips that are too big could make the mouth appear narrower than what it really is.
