What haircut suits my face? The prompt that gets a straight answer

Ask any AI what haircut suits you and it will tell you that you have an oval face and that most things would work on you. That is not a read, it is a compliment. Two changes fix it: force the answer into a fixed format so every row has to commit to a value, and explicitly forbid the encouragement.

You are a barber with twenty years behind the chair, giving me a straight
read. Two photographs are attached: front and side profile, hair dry and
unstyled.

Answer in exactly this format and nothing else.

FACE SHAPE — one of: oval, round, square, oblong, heart, diamond, triangle.
  Name the two proportions you judged it on.
HAIRLINE — mature, straight, widow's peak, receding at the temples, or thinning
  at the crown. Say which, and how far back.
HAIR TYPE — straight, wavy, curly, or coily. Plus fine, medium, or coarse.
DENSITY — sparse, average, or dense. Say what in the photograph tells you that.
GROWTH PATTERN — any cowlick, whorl, or natural part that will fight a style,
  and where it sits.
HEAD SHAPE FROM THE SIDE — flat back or round back.

THEN:

THREE CUTS THAT WORK. For each one: the name, a single sentence on why it works
  for the specific features you listed above, and the clipper guard numbers to
  ask for.

TWO CUTS TO AVOID. For each one: the name, and a single sentence on exactly what
  would go wrong on my head.

RULES
Do not flatter me. If my hairline is receding, write receding.
Do not answer "oval" unless it is genuinely oval.
Do not recommend a cut that needs more hair than the photographs show.
If a photograph does not let you judge a row, write UNSURE for that row rather
  than guessing.
No preamble, no encouragement, no closing paragraph.

Why the format is fixed

Left to write freely, these models produce four paragraphs of reassurance with two usable sentences buried in them. A fixed format forces a value onto every row, and a committed value is something you can check. It also makes two runs comparable, which is the whole basis of the test further down this page.

The rows are in that order deliberately. Hairline and density constrain the answer harder than face shape does, and asking for them first stops the model from picking a cut off face shape alone and then justifying it.

The two lines that stop the flattery

Do not answer “oval” unless it is genuinely oval. Oval is the answer that pleases the most people, because every style guide ever written says an oval face suits everything. A model tuned to be agreeable reaches for it by default. Naming the failure mode is enough to suppress it most of the time.

Write UNSURE rather than guessing. Without a permitted way to not know, the model invents. Give it one and a surprising number of rows come back honest, which tells you something useful in itself: if density comes back UNSURE, your lighting was wrong, and that is worth knowing before you trust anything else in the answer.

How to tell whether it is guessing

• ·Run it twice in two fresh chats. Not twice in the same conversation, where it can see its first answer. If the face shape changes between runs, it was never measuring.
• ·Check the proportions it named. It has to say what it judged the shape on, usually something like jaw width against cheekbone width, or face length against face width. If the reasoning does not match what you see in your own photo, discard the row.
• ·Check the growth pattern against your own head. You already know where your cowlick is. If it missed it, or invented one you do not have, discount the density read as well: both come from the same close look at the photograph.

What it genuinely cannot see

• ·Your crown. No front or side photograph looks down at the top of your head, which is where thinning starts for most men and where a shorter cut either helps or exposes it.
• ·Density under bad light. Backlight your head and any model on earth will read your hair as sparse. This is the row most often wrong, and it is a photography problem rather than a model problem.
• ·How fast you grow. A cut that looks right on the day can be out of shape in three weeks or hold for eight, and nothing in a photograph tells it which you are.
• ·How much effort you will actually spend. It will happily recommend a cut that needs a blow-dryer and product every morning. Add a line to the prompt about how long you are willing to spend and the three recommendations change.

Turning the answer into something you can look at

A list of three cut names is a decision you still have to make blind. Take the guard numbers it gave you for each one and feed them into the render prompt, one at a time, going back to the original photograph for each attempt. Three runs will tell you more than the analysis did.