Mewing: The Ultimate Guide
What is Mewing?
Mewing is a long-term technique for improving your facial structure. It’s basically one of the most important things you can really do to have a chiseled jawline, prominent cheekbones, cheek hollows, and attain the overall model look.
I have to admit, the first time I heard this years ago, I thought it was the dumbest thing ever and tantamount to bullshit. I mean, it’s all genetics! Changing your face or bone structure is ridiculous. However, this attitude stems from the fact that people think of bones only in the context of fossils, hardened, immovable objects. But this isn’t how bones exist in our bodies, where they have a vascular supply and help produce cells from bone marrow.
Bones in adults are actually still malleable, and they are constantly undergoing bone remodeling. In babies, 100% of the bone gets remodeled per year, and in adults, it’s about 10%. However, it’s still totally within the realm of possibility to get positive, permanent changes to your bone structure.
However, it takes lots of work and dedication to actually get your bones to do what you want. It also gets harder with age. After 25, it’s still possible but will be an uphill battle. As a prehistoric human, your life at 25 would have been more than halfway over and things would have started to slow down. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be mewing however, as bones can and will get worse with age.
One of the most popular examples is this progress report posted by a lookism user:
YouTuber AstroSky also changed his face over several years through dedication to mewing:
Here is a 2-year progress photo from a Reddit user:
If you still doubt that mewing works, check out more mewing before/after photos.
Mewing is especially effective at younger ages where the bones are more pliable than in adults and are still growing. These two kids below were outfitted with a training device in their mouth that forced them to keep their tongue in the correct position. This saved them from expensive orthodontic treatments in the future and improved the shape of their face:
Also, mewing has actual health benefits that could save your life. As your face elongates from improper posture and your tongue slips into your throat, you’re more likely to get sleep apnea. Learning to breathe through your nose and mewing correctly can help prevent sleep apnea, wherein not enough oxygen is absorbed during sleep. Sleep apnea also increases the risk of cardiovascular disease according to the Sleep Health Heart Study in 2001.
It doesn’t stop there. People who suffer from sleep apnea have a 2-3 times higher risk of stroke according to a 2010 study from the American Journal of Respiratory Critical Care Medicine. They also face more than 3 times the risk of premature death.
A face that is shaped improperly won’t function properly. In addition to the sleep apnea, you’re more likely to snore, have less horizontal space for the teeth (eventually leading to crooked teeth), are more likely to have a blocked nose, and more likely to have hearing problems from blocked eustachian tubes. Without mewing, you might also develop vision problems, as your vision basically depends on the shape of your eyeball, which depends on your skull shape.
Many people overcomplicate mewing and understand the technique, but it’s actually quite simple. Mewing was invented by Dr. Mew. Check out his YouTube channel Orthotropics for videos discussing mewing and how it works.
In addition, remember this is a long term strategy for optimizing your looks, not something you can do in a few months unless you’re very young. Get ready for it to take a literal/actual decade before you achieve amazing results with consistent dedication every single day, especially if you’re over 25. Basically, have realistic expectations.
Remember however that mewing won’t make you look like someone else. While it will certainly make you look better, your genetics are still your foundation.
How Does Mewing Work?
To understand how the bones of your face get remodeled, it’s necessary to realize that bone structure isn’t static in adults. While bones don’t change overnight, they definitely warp when exposed to consistent pressures for long durations. The downside for us is that this means successful mewing takes a long time.
In patients that have had strokes and lost the ability to contract muscles on their face, one side of the face has a completely different bone structure from the muscles being unable to contract.
In ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, such as in the case of Stephen Hawking, the skull was clearly morphed after years with the disease. But ALS is a disease of the muscles, not bones.
Muscular dystrophy, another disease of the muscles, also warps the facial bones. Note how the picture on the right shows a recessed maxilla and an outline of where it should be in a completely healthy face.
Again, the moral of the story is this:
Small Force & Long Duration > Strong Force & Shorter Duration
Think of a tree that has grown around a rock, fence or other obstruction. It does so because the force exerted by the fence is always constant. It’s the small consistent changes that add up. If you press too hard with your tongue and your tongue gets too tired to stay up on the roof of your mouth because it’s tired, you’ve done nothing but waste time.
Mewing Facial Changes
Now, what exactly does mewing do for your skull? To understand, first note the bones of the skull:
The mandible is your jaw, and the maxilla is basically your midface. When it gets elongated from mouth breathing, you wind up with an unattractive long face.
So now mewing comes to the rescue. After performing it consistently for years, it causes the following bone remodeling: moving the maxilla aka the midface up and forward, augmenting the zygomatic bones and rotating the mandible to give you a better gonial angle. The hyoid bone also moves up, making your jawline stand out.

Gonial Angle
This leads to a more attractive face because you’ll have a more square prominent jaw, visible cheek hollows, and prominent cheekbones. When your midface moves upward & forward, your cheekbones also move apart from each other and get wider, creating a larger space under them, which leads to hollow cheeks provided you have low enough body fat. This also does several things to your eye area and primarily makes it look more attractive by decreasing your orbital height, increasing your canthal tilt, and making the eyes more deep-set in the back of your skull (Hunter Eyes).
However, note that it doesn’t necessarily give you a wider jaw. For that, the best thing you can do is to chew gum every day and develop your masseter muscles or get fillers.

Ideal Facial Growth
The above picture describes both the optimal direction for facial growth and the direction you should be pushing with your tongue.
The above picture describes the forces generated by mewing. The first picture shows an upward force that comes from the tongue and having your teeth together which will cause your cheekbones to bulge out. Since each force has an equal and opposite reaction, the upwards pressure by your tongue will create a downward force on your ramus, increasing your gonial angle.
Since your teeth your upper and lower jaws locked together, your lower jaw will go along for the ride and move forward along with your maxilla.
How to Mew Correctly
- Straighten your back, stop hunching and move your head back if you have forward head posture.
- Close your lips. This will create a seal and prevents mouth breathing.
- Have your teeth touching. Don’t quite clench your teeth, but make sure your lower jaw is supporting your maxilla.
- Then, rest your tongue on the roof of your mouth, not just the tip of the tongue. Press your whole entire tongue on the roof of your mouth. Cover as much surface area of your upper palate as you can. Focus on the back, by your wisdom teeth. Since the roof of the mouth is curved, you won’t be able to get it completely flat. So just contour your tongue to cover as much surface area of the roof of your mouth as you can. Again, focus on making sure the back third of your tongue is on the roof of your mouth.
- Contract your muscles under your chin to help force your tongue onto the roof of your mouth.
This is your hyoid bone. You should be able to squeeze the muscles around this area and watch this part of your neck go up. A helpful way to think of it is to suck your hyoid bone upward into your skull.
- Hold this posture for as long of a duration as you can. Remind yourself to do it constantly throughout the day. Keep your mouth closed and breathe through your nose the entire time.
Mewing Tips
Just practicing proper tongue posture will get you on the right track. However, there’s still several more things you should pay attention to if you truly want to maximize your results.
- You’ll know you’re doing it right when your hyoid bone gets tucked upward and inward. Watch yourself mew in a side profile and note your submental-cervical angle. Your hyoid bone should be high and tight.
- If you’re having trouble applying the technique, try starting from the very back of your tongue and going forwards. Press as hard as you can on the back third, and then slowly get the middle of your tongue on the roof of your mouth, and then finally the tip of the tongue, which you rest just before your front teeth.
- Remember that it’s key to keep your teeth together because your mandible should naturally support your maxilla. If you have your tongue on the roof of your mouth but don’t have your jaw clenched, you’re not mewing. Your midface is still lacking support and your mandible is still dropping if your teeth aren’t slightly touching.
- Never forget to remember to press with the back third of your tongue. This is going to feel uncomfortable at first and it means you’re doing it right. This is the hardest part of mewing correctly. Some people feel like their airway gets cut off. This is normal. Focus on the posterior third of your tongue as much as you can.
- Do not press super hard. The changes in bone structure that come from mewing come from exerting a small pressure over a long period of time, not exerting a strong pressure over a short period of time. Merely pressing hard against the roof of your mouth for an hour isn’t going to get the bones to change. It’s far better to hold the exercise for 20 minutes than to press really hard for 5 minutes.
- Do not push super hard on your teeth themselves with your tongue. Completely flatten your tongue, yes, but don’t try to mess up your teeth. While mewing will increase your IMW (intermolar width), this will happen naturally from the maxilla’s upward and forward expansion.
- If you don’t have enough room on your upper palate to place your tongue, devices such as an MSE (Maxillary Skeletal Expander) will literally move your teeth apart and stretch out your maxilla. The lady below used a biobloc (a palate expander), which illustrates the importance of intermolar width and palatal expansion:
- It’s training yourself to hold your tongue in the proper position that’s going to change your face over a long period of time. The benchmark to know if you’re doing mewing correctly is if you find your tongue resting on the roof of your mouth while you’re not thinking about it. It should be completely automatic. Until then, keep practicing, and don’t waste all your effort jamming it up on the roof of the mouth as hard as you can.
- Duration is more important than intensity. If you find that you’re always pressing TOO hard, then cut the amount of force you’re applying by half. And then do it again, until your tongue is just gently resting on the roof of your mouth.
- My favorite tip for actually getting success with mewing is to have inanimate objects as memory triggers. For example, think of something you do quite often, like opening a door or checking your cell phone. The doorknob or your cell phone could be a trigger to perform mewing and fix your posture.
- Even if you only remember it for 5 minutes after seeing the object, the frequency of these events will ensure that you’re doing it throughout your whole day, consistently. And consistency is what’s important if you want to see results. Try to mew 24/7. Breathing entirely through your nose should just be normal and this should just be your new lifestyle. Remember, you’re literally getting uglier if you’re not doing this.
Mouth breathing
Mouth breathing can be considered the opposite of mewing. Since your mandible isn’t supporting your maxilla, both your mandible and maxilla move down, giving you a long face. This is going to get you further and further away from the ideal face. If you mouth breathe at night, get it handled. Considering buying a strap. If you have sinus/allergy issues, you need to stay on top of those at all times.
Look at the progression of facial changes that happen when you breathe through your mouth:
This kid had the potential to be attractive but mouthbreathing really set him back.
These two girls are twins, but the one on the right is a mouth breather.
Clearly, the environment trumps genetics in this case. The “it’s all genetics” excuse doesn’t apply here.
Body Posture
Proper body posture is supremely important. It supports your mewing efforts, and you should dedicate a lot of time to posture work alone. The main reason is that when people crane their neck forward and look at books/cell-phones all day, the mouth naturally opens. It can sabotage your mewing efforts and this can even start from your pelvis:
An anterior pelvic tilt or slumped shoulders will cause you to naturally stick your head out. When your head is too far forward you will tend to open your mouth, drop your tongue, and you won’t have as much contact area on the posterior third of your mouth to mew with. That’s why some people can only mew properly by tucking their chin back.
Refer to this video for gym posture exercises:
Stand up straight, and do a Mckenzie Chin tuck whenever you can. This is key to fixing that “nerd neck”. Here is a video by Dr. Mew explaining how the Mckenzie Chin tuck works:
Literally bring your chin back, and hold it for an hour while you’re working on something at your house. It stretches the muscles in the back of your neck and improves your posture over time. It helps with mewing by giving you more space to push upwards on the back of your tongue. If you find that you have difficulty pushing up on the back third of your tongue and/or holding it, practice this as much as you can.
Notice how performing a chin tuck makes you mew automatically. This is why posture is important.
Proper Swallowing
Proper swallowing consists of using your masseter muscles, the muscles responsible for chewing hard foods, instead of your cheek muscles. Most people suck in their food and have an infantile swallowing technique. What you want to do instead is chew up the food as best you can and roll it up into a little ball. Then, use your tongue to sweep the bolus of food back into your throat. This also pushes up on your maxilla, which is what you should be doing anyway.
This takes some practice, but if you keep doing this consistently instead of using your cheek muscles to swallow, you’ll atrophy those cheek muscles and achieve a hollowed cheek look. Here is Dr. Mew’s video on proper swallowing.
Basically, if you’re in doubt, just pay conscious attention to your buccinator muscles:
To get it to atrophy, you shouldn’t use it at all, for anything. Never suck on anything. Don’t swish food around in your mouth, don’t do anything with it. The only thing you’re allowed to do is chew up and down in the vertical plane using your masseter and zygomaticus muscles.
Suction Hold (Advanced Technique)
After you’ve gotten used to keeping your tongue on the roof of your mouth 24/7 for several months, I recommend learning how to apply a suction hold. This will help you hold the position longer and with less effort. If you find that saliva keeps building up, that’s because you’re opening up the salivary glands, which will be less noticeable in time.
To do the suction hold first start mewing. Then when saliva builds up, use the tip of your tongue to perform a mew push swallow. Just like above, without removing your tongue from the roof of your mouth, sweep the spit across your tongue and down into your gullet, like you would a piece of food. Eventually, this builds up a vacuum within your mouth. Get it to just the right pressure where your tongue isn’t being shoved into your teeth, yet it takes less effort for you to keep your tongue up there.
Gum Chewing
Ancient humans would work very hard to chew their food. The food itself was hard, and it was less calorie-dense. Like animals, they would grind down their teeth from so much chewing. With a modern diet full of carbs and soft foods, we don’t have to do that anymore. We don’t have to struggle just to get our nutrition, but our faces are literally melting as a result of this luxury. Look at this comparison of the wear and tear on teeth between ancient humans and modern humans.
Luckily, we have chewing gum, which activates a bunch of muscles in your mouth that are key to developing a good facial structure. It’s also hard work and it won’t wear down your teeth. Chewing gum will make your face more square instead of oval. There are two techniques for developing your face using chewing gum, and I recommend buying some falim gum or other sugar-free gum.
First, there’s “tongue chewing”, which is a technique that also pushes up on your maxilla. It’s exactly as it sounds: instead of using your teeth to chew on the piece of gum, push the gum up on the maxilla. This can be done with food too. This helps with your mewing goals obviously as you’re also creating upward and forward growth on the maxilla by pushing on it.
Secondly, and what you should be focused on if you want a bigger jaw, there’s “big bolus chewing”, which involves chewing gum with your teeth like normal, but moving the gum around your teeth from the left side to the right side repeatedly instead of keeping it in one place. It’s also done with multiple pieces of gum that form a large bolus (hence the name) so that you have an actual challenge.
Beware that when chewing gum you don’t get TMJ. Start at 30 minutes per day, 5 days a week. Add 5 minutes each week and your jaw will grow & grow.
Hard Mewing (Advanced Technique)
Hard mewing refers to pressing your tongue on your upper palate with much more force than normal, to the point where you can feel pressure in your skull. Your tongue should be on the roof of your mouth 24/7, and you shouldn’t even think about hard mewing until you’ve got to that point. Most people don’t recommend hard mewing as it could potentially be dangerous and lead to asymmetries.
However, I am a proponent of it and try to spend at least part of my day hard mewing. While what we learned earlier holds true, that:
Small Force & Long Duration > Strong Force & Shorter Duration
It’s also true that bones respond to stress/trauma. Before and during puberty, your growth plates haven’t closed and merely keeping your tongue on the roof of your mouth is enough to “guide” your facial growth. After puberty and well into our 20s, I believe you have to do something extra.
However, there’s some caveats with hard mewing:
- You should feel pressure on your cheekbones and throughout your skull. But make sure the pressure you’re exerting is consistent and equal throughout every part of your mouth, or else you’ll be mewing yourself into facial assymmetry. I like to start off with the sides of my tongue first and then go inwards.
- If you hard mew so much that your tongue gets too tired to stay up on your palate 24/7, then it’s not worth doing.
Conclusion
If you’re ugly, there’s hope. You can change your face. But it’s hard work and sacrifice. Bodybuilders put in years of work to change their bodies. You can do the same with your face. Remember to use inanimate objects as memory triggers and to focus on getting the posterior third of your tongue up on the roof of your mouth. This is a slow process and results will be slow. Most people will get discouraged and quit, but there’s plenty of evidence now that this works. Good luck!
While you mew, get the rest of your aesthetics on point. Work on your skin, hair, fitness, etc. These things have much more immediate and gratifying results.











This is your hyoid bone. You should be able to squeeze the muscles around this area and watch this part of your neck go up. A helpful way to think of it is to suck your hyoid bone upward into your skull.




