Do I Have Hooded Eyes?

I’ve been answering one question for over fifteen years: do I have hooded eyes? I was born with hooded eyes and had them for more than four decades. I struggled through every YouTube tutorial that assumed I had a visible crease, wrote the Hooded Eyes Makeup Manual after 20 years of testing makeup on them, and in 2026 I finally had upper blepharoplasty surgery when the excess skin started interfering with my vision. So when I walk you through this, it’s not theory. I’ve lived every stage of hooded eyes, from “why does my eyeliner disappear?” to the surgeon’s office.

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The Quick Answer

You have hooded eyes if excess skin between your browbone and lash line drapes over your crease and hides part of your mobile lid when you look straight ahead. No visible crease at all usually means monolids; a crease hidden under a curtain of skin means hooded.

But “hooded” isn’t one shape. Hooding can be even across the whole eye, weighted to the outer corner, or combined with deepset or downturned eyes, and which type you have changes everything about how makeup behaves on you. Below I’ll show you the different types, plus 50+ real hooded eyes from my community, so you can find the pair that looks most like yours.

On the chart above, I have a quick reference for basic eye shapes. There are six basic eye shapes – round eyes, monolid eyes, hooded eyes, downturned eyes, upturned eyes, and almond eyes. There are also a lot of descriptors with eyes like close set eyes, wide set eyes, asymmetrical eyes, asymmetrical hooded eyes, big eyes, small eyes, and deepset eyes.

Do you have a crease? If you answer no to this, then you likely have monolids. If you answer yes, is your crease hidden beneath a curtain of skin? If you answer yes, then congratulations, you have hooded eyes! Now draw an imaginary horizontal line across your eyes to see if your outer corners pull upwards or downwards. If your eyes turn down, they are downturned, and if they turn up, they are upturned.

Compare Your Eyes to 50+ Real Hooded Eye Shapes

Charts are helpful, but nothing beats seeing real eyes. This video includes over 50 different hooded eye shapes from the lovely ladies of the PhyrraNyx Facebook Group, so you can find the eyes that look most like yours. Thank you so much to everyone who included a photo!

Watch the Video on Youtube with Closed Captioning in English!

What Are Hooded Eyes?

They are eyes that have excess skin from the browbone to the lash line, which hides the crease and mobile eyelid space. If you’re like me, and you’ve struggled for years to follow makeup tutorials on YouTube, magazines or blogs, you might have hooded eyes. Most makeup tutorials are for almond or protruding eyes.

If you are looking straight ahead into a mirror, does excess skin between your eyebrows and eyelashes obscure your crease? If you are unsure, look at the photo of my pre-surgery eyes above. I had excess skin that hid my crease, thus they were hooded. They were also a tad deepset and downturned. By deepset I mean that my eyebrow protrudes slightly past my eyeball. By downturned I mean the outer corner of my eye shape was pulled down by excess skin. In my case, the excess curtain of skin, especially at the outer 2/3 of my eyelid, was hidden by my hooded eyes.

The Different Types of Hooded Eyes

This is the part most eye shape charts skip, and it’s why so many people stare at a chart and still can’t decide. Hooded eyes come in several distinct types, and knowing yours matters more than the label itself.

Fully hooded. The skin drapes evenly across the entire lid, from inner to outer corner. When you look straight ahead, little to no mobile lid is visible anywhere. If this is you, eyeshadow placement needs to happen above your natural crease so it shows when your eyes are open.

Outer-corner hooded. The hood is weighted toward the outer third or outer half of the eye, while the inner portion of your lid stays visible. This was my type. The outer curtain of skin is what makes winged liner fold or transfer, and it’s why the standard flick tutorial fails on us.

Hooded and deepset. Your browbone protrudes past your eyeball, so the eye sits back in the socket and has skin draping over the crease. Mine were slightly deepset on top of being hooded, which you can see in my photos below.

Hooded and downturned. The excess skin pulls the outer corners downward. Draw that imaginary line across your pupils: if your outer corners sit below it and you have a hidden crease, you’re in this group with me.

Partially or slightly hooded. Some of your crease shows, but skin still touches or covers your lash line in places, especially by the end of the day. People with slightly hooded eyes often don’t realize they have them, they just wonder why their liner smudges.

Age-onset hooding. Some people are born with hooded eyes, like me. Others develop hooding over time as skin loses elasticity. The makeup challenges are the same, but if hooding appears or worsens quickly, it’s worth mentioning to your eye doctor.

Your eyes can absolutely be more than one of these at once. Mine were outer-corner hooded, slightly deepset, and slightly downturned, all at the same time.

Do I Have Hooded Eyes?

For the image above I drew a straight horizontal line across my pupils to determine if my outer corners turn up or down. In these pre-surgery photos, my outer corners turn slightly down and are slightly deepset, which you can see by the way the excess hooded eye skin covers the outer corners. If your eyes look like mine did, congrats! They are hooded, slightly deepset, and slightly downturned.

Even if they don’t look exactly like mine, your eyes may still be hooded. There are different shapes of hooded eyes, as you saw above. Youtuber Alissa Ashley has hoodies and I think they look quite different from my eyes in the photos above, taken in my early 40s.

The usual giveaway for hoodies is that the mobile lid (the part by the lash line) is partially or fully obscured by excess skin draping over it from the browbone.

Other Ways to Tell You Have Hooded Eyes

Does your eye makeup crease, fade, or wear away during the day? Does your eyeliner smear easily? You could have hooded eyes like me. When my eyes were fully hooded, the excess skin rubbed together every time I blinked, so my makeup wore away unless I used eyeshadow primer, set with setting powder, and then applied eye makeup. Seriously, it was gone in 20 minutes or less. My go-to is Kiko Eyeshadow Primer, which keeps my eye makeup in place all day.

Do I Have Deep Set or Downturned or Hooded Eyes?

This image is a really great visual to show you the difference between Deep Set and Protruding eyes. My mobile eyes are the opposite of protruding.

You can tell my eyes were slightly deepset and downturned from the side, as well as hooded, because you can literally see a curtain of skin over the outer half of my eyes in these photos. The side view is honestly the easiest way to spot deepset eyes on yourself: take a profile photo and look at whether your browbone sticks out past your eye.

Celebrities with Hooded Eyes

Some of the most beautiful celebrities in the world have hooded eyes! Blake Lively, Jennifer Lawrence, Taylor Swift, Claudia Schiffer, Kate Hudson, and Emma Stone all have them! I think my eyes look most similar to Kate Hudson or Emma Stone. If seeing makeup techniques on famous faces helps it click for you, I broke down celebrity-inspired hooded eye makeup tips in a separate post.

Cat Eye Liner on Hooded Eyes

Winged liner is the number one thing people with hooded eyes tell me they’ve given up on. You don’t have to give up on it, you just have to stop following instructions written for almond eyes.

For my particular shape, I find that if I create my winged liner from the lower lid first, I end up with the correct angle for my face. Following the line of my lower lash line upward means the wing sits where my hood doesn’t swallow it. It’s quite literally all about working your best angles.

Here’s the trick in the photo above: chin down, eyes up at the mirror. That position keeps your lid taut enough to draw on without pulling at your skin, and it shows you what the wing will actually look like when your eye is open, which on hooded eyes is the only view that matters.

And proof that hooded eyes don’t mean giving up on color: this is Baby Bat Beauty’s Amulet doing the heavy lifting on my hooded lids. Placement higher than feels natural is the secret, so the color shows when your eyes are open.

If you want to go deeper on technique, my hooded eyes eyeshadow tutorial walks through placement step by step, and the best eyeshadow brushes for hooded eyes covers the brush shapes that make it easier.

Why Do I Have Hooded Eyes?

I was born with them. I had them for most of my life until my surgery. Some people are born with them. Other people develop them with age. Other reasons you can have them can be health related, so if you are concerned, talk to your eye doctor.

Do Hooded Eyes Affect Eyesight?

Yes they can affect eyesight. In my 20s I had no issues from my hoods. By my 40s, I noticed that the hood over the outer part of my eyes had started to mess with my vision. If you notice things like blurry vision, difficulty reading, or loss of peripheral vision, definitely talk to your doctor. Because I was born with them, the sag only got worse over time, and it eventually interfered with my vision enough that I had blepharoplasty surgery to correct it. You can read all about my experience, from consultation through recovery, in my blepharoplasty post.

Do Hooded Eyes Go Away With Weight Loss?

When I lost 40 lbs, I actually had people ask me if I expected my hoods to go away. The answer is no, because I was born with them. If you developed hooded eyes because of weight gain, you may end up with less hooded eyes after weight loss, but eyes that are born hooded stay hooded.

Are Hooded Eyes Genetic? Do Irish or Scandinavians Have Them?

People genuinely ask me whether the Irish have hooded eyes, and whether Scandinavians have hooded eyes, and it makes me laugh a bit. Eye shapes run in families, and I’ve got Irish ancestry and had hooded eyes, but no one race or nationality has identical eye shapes. Hooded eyes show up everywhere.

Do Hooded Eyes Make You Look Tired?

The truth is, they can. My eyes definitely did not make me look tired in my 20s, but by my 40s I felt like they were starting to. That heaviness over the outer corners was part of why I eventually chose blepharoplasty.

Do Hooded Eyes Make You Look Older?

In my opinion, where my eyes are concerned, they can. For years I felt like the only tell-tale sign of my age was my eyes.

Do Hooded Eyes Go Away?

If you’re born with them, like me, they will never go away on their own. If you are born with hooded eyes, those are your eyes. If you ended up getting hooded eyes because of your weight and then you lose weight, you may end up with less hooded eyes. The only way I know of to make hooded eyes go away permanently is blepharoplasty surgery, which I eventually had myself once my hoods began interfering with my vision. Surgery isn’t something I decided to do lightly, and it isn’t something you should decide on a whim either. If it’s something you really want, make sure you do your research. My blepharoplasty post covers my entire experience.

Can I Change My Hooded Eyes?

I get asked how to change hooded eyes frequently. As I mentioned before, you can have blepharoplasty surgery to permanently change your eyes, which I ultimately did. However, there are much less invasive ways to alter your appearance.

Lid correcting strips can truly, dramatically change your appearance. I wrote a full guide to eyelid tape for hooded eyes with everything I learned, but the short version: they take a bit of practice to get used to, I’ve never really been able to get makeup to look right on top of them, and I love how they change my eye shape. In the photo above I’m wearing 7mm lid correcting strips from Contours RX to change the shape of my hooded eyes; there are plenty of other eyelid tape brands on Amazon too. Before my surgery, these strips were my favorite non-invasive way to experiment with my eye shape.

If you have eyes like I did and you struggle with makeup, my book Hooded Eyes Makeup Manual is for you! I wrote it at the request of my Phyrra Family. So many of you asked for a collection of my tutorials in a book, so I included many different step-by-step eye makeup tutorials. I also filled it with all the tips and tricks I’ve learned from my makeup artist friends over the past two decades, such as Norah Salazar, Danessa Myricks, and James Vincent.

My Book also has a brush guide to help you find the best brushes for our eye shape and all the tutorials list generic color terms so you can recreate any of the tutorials within it with what you have on hand. You do NOT need to buy the brands I mention in the book unless you want to. You just need to look for similar shapes for brushes and similar hues for makeup. The Book is available in both print and digital format.

So You Have Hooded Eyes. Here’s Where to Go Next

Now that you know what you’re working with, here’s the path I’d take, depending on what you want:

If you want your makeup to actually work: start with my hooded eyes eyeshadow tutorial for placement, grab the right tools from the best eyeshadow brushes for hooded eyes, and see my picks for the best eyeshadow palettes for hooded eyes.

If you want to change your eye shape without surgery: read my complete guide to eyelid tape for hooded eyes. It was my favorite option for over a decade.

If your hoods are affecting your vision or you’re considering surgery: my blepharoplasty experience covers everything from consultation through recovery, with photos.

So tell me, do you have hooded eyes? And which type?

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