Large eyes, a high forehead and soft features — what the industry calls a child-like type. Age has nothing to do with it: the term describes features, not a passport, and a baby face turns up at thirty-five as readily as at seventeen.
How to tell whether it is your type
Round or wide-open eyes, a short distance from nose to lip, a soft jawline, low cheekbones. In photographs you usually look younger than you are, and strangers regularly misjudge your age by five years or more.
The check takes a minute: photograph yourself without makeup in even light and compare against beauty campaigns and advertising for family products. If your face sits in that row naturally and has to be forced into hard runway looks, the type is yours.
What work it brings
Beauty, cosmetics, and advertising that needs openness and trust: household goods, banking services, anything domestic. Covers and campaigns lit softly. On the runway this face is booked less often — it loses against the hard line of a collection — but there is more commercial work, and it pays better.
What to shoot for the book
A clean beauty portrait, a frame with a calm smile and one without, a shoot with live expression. Heavy makeup and theatrical looks do not build this book: they show what nobody will book you for.
The usual mistake is trying to look sterner and older to reach the runway niche. The industry is short of convincing warm faces and oversupplied with sharp ones.
What it is confused with
A commercial face: both are friendly, but a commercial face reads as adult and universal, while a baby face reads young and soft. The type went mainstream after the Prada show of 2004 with Gemma Ward.
