How To Widen Your Mouth (small mouthcels GTFIH)

[wristcel]

 

[MEMPSK]

wtf

 

[Deleted member 15854]

Disclaimer!!! I wrote none of this, I just copy and pasted it from a Quora post while doing research since I had been planning to discuss this issue. I've seen talk on how to widen your mouth but nothing in a big thread like this. inb4 "muh plagiarism" or some bs like that, why would I waste my time when someone has already wasted it themselves? Save the autism and just read jfl

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 surprisingly many good reasons you might want a wider mouth beyond mere medical necessity.

Only recently has the horizontal width of our mouths been recognized as a much more significant factor in judgment of overall facial beauty by others than previously assumed.

A growing number of people are starting to take notice that mouths with lateral widths close to about 1.6 times the width of their noses (Golden Ratio) are the most aesthetically pleasing of all, in other words the most beautiful.

People of course want to be attractive, and after eyebrows and eyes, your mouth is one of your most visible facial features. Our lips’ color usually contrasts clearly with the coloration of the rest of our faces, so anything that can enhance their visual appeal should be quite welcome. Lips color changes from lipstick and procedures to thin or thicken lips have been used for a very long time to enhance beauty. A ratio of lower lip vertical width to upper lip vertical width of 1.6 is also ideal. Now the optimal horizontal width of your entire relaxed mouth (what it looks like when it’s closed with no voluntary effort to widen it) to nose ratio approaching 1.62:1 has been recognized as a very important contributing factor as well in overall perception of facial beauty for either gender.

According to a recent scholarly research article (statisticsfacpub) the neoclassical cannon (a widely recognized set of beauty rules) of the attractive mouth to nose ratio of 1.5:1 should be revised to 1.618:1, the famed Golden Ratio, since the study participants of both genders rated the latter ratio more beautiful for both genders, same and opposite sex, than 1.5:1 and much greater than 1.2:1 or lower. Perception of beauty also starts to drop off when the relaxed mouth to nose width ratio exceeds 1.8:1—so if your mouth to nose width ratio is already a little greater than 1.6:1, you’re still right at the top.

Above a 2:1 relaxed mouth to nose width ratio (measured straight across, not curved around your face) is perceived as more and more abnormal in appearance as it increases beyond this figure, so there’s no need to embrace your inner frog or Joker in your quest for a beautiful mouth.

However, when you are actually putting effort into a big smile your widened mouth to nose width ratio can briefly exceed 2:1 to over 2.5:1 and still look really striking in a very good way. As long as you frequently relax back to a ratio in the neighborhood of 1.6:1, you’ll remain on top of things in the facial aesthetics department..

To summarize, if your resting (relaxed neutral expression) mouth is from 1.5–1.8 times your nose width measured straight across (not following your facial curve with a flexible ruler), you’re pretty much set. If you were blessed with the right parents and grew up with a mouth to nose width ratio like this, then give God or nature a broad grateful smile and enjoy. Image below from Pinterest shows kids benefiting from having a wide-mouthed father, most obviously with the boy.
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The issue is that a large percentage of people naturally have much narrower mouths, ratios to nose width being 1.2 to less than 1.0, most often inherited from parents with similar oral to nasal measurements ratios. The study cited above indicates that perception of overall facial beauty is lower in people with mouths similar in width to their noses.

There are a lot of benefits that can come with your wider mouth (natural or otherwise), especially when it approaches the 1.6:1 golden ratio to your nose width. These are just some of them.

1. Easy, relaxed toothy ‘celebrity’ smile.
2. Better singing dynamics and projection. AMAZING YOUNG BOY singing - I will always love you // THE VOICE KIDS
3. Strong connection to being an effective and credible leader. People with wider mouths are better leaders
4. Enhanced ability to project intelligible speech at a higher volume over a greater distance.
5. Perception of greater generosity.Lips Shapes Meaning and Personality
6. Much more convenient and less painful access to the oral cavity for dental and orthodontic procedures.
7. Easier eating and drinking, especially if your original mouth was quite small.
8. Enhanced intimate activities—I’ll leave the details to the reader’s imagination.
9. Heightened overall impression of facial beauty (see reasons above and examples below).

Don’t despair if you currently have a narrow horizontal oral opening, with a non-ideal ratio to your nose width, because it turns out you aren’t necessarily stuck with the kind of mouth you were born with.

Thanks to modern plastic surgery methods that preserve normal mouth function with insignificant to almost no scarring, a wider mouth could be yours in a matter of a few hours at the clinic. It costs money to do this, though, and unless oral function is compromised by a narrow mouth, most insurance companies won’t cover this.

If the costs or worries about surgical complications are making you shy away from plastic surgery, don’t worry because there are two ways to visibly widen your mouth opening horizontally:

Non-surgical and surgical

It is possible to widen your mouth by manual methods, but it will take time and commitment with rather modest, yet clearly visible, results if you wish to do it without surgery. This will involve use of stretching exercises in certain key ways in conjunction with wearing a mouth-widening brace that helps sustain effective horizontal stretching for an extended period of time, necessary for it to be effective. Some of these techniques and devices will be described below.

I should know; the stretching method worked for me.

The other is surgical, adapted from methods developed for treating microstomia (a mouth opening that is abnormally small). This procedure is traditionally used for correcting congenital microstomia, or acquired microstomia through burns or disease. However, certain plastic surgeons (some in India, Mexico, South America, Europe, and several in the United States) are well-trained in adapting these surgical techniques for widening healthy narrow mouths using a procedure called a commissurotomy, followed by a commissuroplasty. The first procedure is the cutting procedure and the second is to establish new lateral commissures and rearrange the muscles on the enlarged mouth so scarring is minimal and the mouth remains fully functional. This method is described in greater detail later on in my answer.

Do you want a mouth as wide as the guy on the right in the picture below has, or a bit narrower like the woman?


What you want will make a difference in how realistic it might be to stick with non-surgical methods. The wider one will likely be achieved only by plastic surgery like the guy on the right had (I don’t know anything about the woman—sorry). The look works for this guy in my opinion—he had a palatal expander treatment, then decided on the mouth widening surgery to showcase his new and improved dentition. The woman’s palate is clearly narrower than the man’s and making her mouth much wider than it is might not be such a good idea since a wider smile would only show the insides of her cheeks in addition to her teeth. I other words mouth-widening beyond a certain point might not be appropriate for some people.

Cheryl Hines wide mouth looks really good on her—I believe hers is natural.



A wide mouth allows for showing a lot of teeth with even a casual smile.

Model Tim Borrmann rocks the wide mouth, too. His mouth to nose width ratio is pretty close to the ideal Golden Ratio (1.618…), supposedly the most visually appealing look of all. (Images from Pinterest). I measured {on my computer monitor} his mouth width in the picture below of 5.0 cm and nose width of 3.1 cm. 5.0/3.1 = 1.613:1 ratio.
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Who wouldn't want an amazing face with such pleasantly balanced features like this?
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Even relaxed, Tim’s mouth looks just perfect for his face.
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Of course the wrap around smile is the most obvious visible benefit of a nice wide mouth.

Now that you’re hooked on the idea of having a wider mouth your own, here are the options.

First, the non-surgical method:

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 side-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 encouraged to contract to shorter lengths to accommodate a wider smile for this to work (see picture below this one).



I developed my own mouth stretching apparatus with a unique shape and used it successfully to noticeably widen my 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 outside on sunlit snow.

Update 11/20/20: Make that four years without chapped lips.

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.

Edit (6/22/19). Due to increased interest I am now showing my favorite mouth stretcher design. This mouth-widening brace uses smoothed and highly polished 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.

Edit (4/15/22). I am working on further refinements of the mouth-widening brace design that now is cut with a water jet metal cutter from thin solid sheets of stainless steel (easier to cut, polish, shape, and keep clean) with horizontal rows of breath holes. All edges are smoothed and rounded by application of metalworking carborundum paper followed by stainless steel polish, as is the rest of the brace/appliance. The otherwise thin ends are then covered with thermoplastic so as to spread out the stretching force so even the most extreme stretching doesn’t result in injured lips, and allows tolerance of longer periods of wear.

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. (Update: the 10 cm one now also uses “boil and bite” mouthguard thermoplastic.) The perforations permit normal breathing and somewhat coherent speech while the brace is being worn. Due to the small size of the perforations, breathing through the appliance while it’s being worn produces a pleasant white sound rather than whistling or annoying hisses.

I’m also in the process of determining which horizontal hole pattern in the newer solid stainless steel sheet-cut ones produces the least amount of noise when breathed through (some prototypes’ breath holes actually whistle when breathed through—I personally think it’s fun, though I suspect most people wouldn’t want that).

While slightly slurred and sounding somewhat different from my normal appliance-free speech, if I substitute “n” for “m,” “d” for “b,” and “t” for “p,” moving my tongue as far forward as possible with the substitute consonants, and normal tongue position for words that actually use m, b, or p, my speech is fully intelligible for most listeners. To make the “f” sound, merely sending a puff of exhaled breath at the right moment through the perforations makes a passable phoneme. The letter “v” is just the voiced version of the “f” puffed breath adaptation. It took practice, but I can now talk on the phone and not have to remove the mouth-widening appliance.

Of course you can just take out the appliance/brace while you’re on the phone and put it back in your mouth when you’re done.

Here’s what the perforated stainless steel ones look like.

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Please excuse the so-so quality of my selfie. I was 57 when this picture was taken 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.

Another advantage to the design is the fact that if properly curved the middle part of the appliance applies little or no pressure on your front teeth. Thus, in widening your mouth this way, you won’t have to get orthodontic work done to move your teeth back forward to their proper position. The curvature has to be right; if too curved the appliance tends to come out of your mouth, and if not curved enough there will be some pressure on the teeth and gums. The wide part of the mouth-widening brace/appliance supports the upper and lower orbicularis oris muscles from behind on both the top and bottom and uses the pressure from the ends to keep the brace curved away from pressing on your teeth. If done right, a mouth-widening brace can be worn for minutes to hours without serious discomfort or danger of shifting your teeth, yet give your lips the sustained stretch you’re seeking.

Other stretchers that rely only on hooks and elastic for sustained pulling on the corners of the mouth pull the lips tightly against the teeth. The sustained pressure over time will likely push the teeth so they shift backward toward the mouth’s interior. You do not want that.
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If anyone wants something like this, let me know by sending me a message. 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. Before I started 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—most of these caused pressure on my teeth so I abandoned them).

Edit (4/16/22): My current measurements are a bit over 6.0 cm wide measured straight across, 7.0+ cm if I follow the curve of my lips with a flexible ruler, and my maximum forced smile with cheek muscle efforts alone is 9 cm measured straight across and 11 cm if I follow the curve of my lips. When viewed from the sides, I can see my upper first molars while doing my widest smile.

This shows 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).
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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 58).

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. The mouth-widening braces by the time you’ve reached that point are usually comfortable enough to wear for an hour or more without any discomfort; you may even be able to sleep wearing one. I have slept wearing one maybe a half an inch or 1 cm shorter than my “therapeutic” one that still actively stretches my lips beyond normal.

Update 2/13/20: I realized that side views don’t tell my own story adequately, so I found two “Photo Booth” pictures I had taken a bit over three years apart. One was taken July 7th 2016 before I had started my own mouth-widening project. The other was taken November 13th 2019. I sized the images so they’re at the same scale, though the resolution and lighting is a bit different. Notice in the first image my mouth is only a tiny bit wider than my nose. I didn’t like how my mouth to nose width ratio looked in this and other pictures taken of me prior to then, hence the inspiration for my mouth-widening project.
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Now take a look at the next image taken three years later. My face is just as relaxed as it was in the first image—or else my nose and face shape would have been different. Notice that I have no more wrinkles or sagging on the corners of my mouth despite the stretching, yet it’s obviously visibly wider—and I’m now 58.
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f my appliances hadn’t worked on me, I would never have mentioned them, since I don’t exactly feel like embarrassing myself in front of over 300k readers (so far). I believe in them because they work, and I have made more progress (without giving myself sagging wrinkles, lips, or other damage) in a year with this design than with any other appliance I’ve come up with.

I have made additional progress in the couple of months since then, as I have since made and currently use a 12 cm appliance (it’s of course a tight fit as expected); I can now force-smile widely enough while wearing the 10 cm appliance to permit it to fall out of my mouth with a slight tongue push. My mouth is as of today between 6–6.5 cm wide straight across, and if I follow the curve of my lips around the front of my face, it’s between 6.5 and 7 cm as of February 13th, 2020. My nose is still 4.2 cm wide. The mouth to nose width ratio range is from 1.55 to 1.67 for the curve following measurement, meaning the average is 1.61, almost exactly the Golden Ratio—my goal.

Another person who'd answered this question in 2018 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.

Surgical Method:

Note: I’m not connected in any way to Dr. Eppley or anyone else referenced, and do not receive (nor have asked for) any sort of compensation or personal gain from anyone. I’m just motivated by the opportunity to pass on what I’ve learned about the surprisingly large number of benefits of getting a mouth width to nose width ratio of 1.6:1 and how to actually get it done for ourselves.

Most of the surgical results images and methods I describe and show below are either from “Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery” by Maria Z. Siemionow and Marita Eisenmann-Klein or the Dr. Barry Eppley website for his Plastic Surgery clinic in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA: Cosmetic Plastic Surgeon Indianapolis IN | Dr. Barry Eppley

The object of this surgery is to change not only the opening of your mouth, but also move and resection the muscles so that they can accommodate your new wider oral opening and lengthened lips without any unusual conscious effort.

The only negative I can immediately think of is if you don’t manually stretch your mouth width, any tendency toward chapped lips you had before surgery will likely be the same as before, or maybe worse near the newly extended corners of your mouth.

The scariest part for me is the fact that if you wish to get a significantly wider mouth (2 to 6 cm wider), you have to allow the surgeon to cut the ring-shaped orbicularis oris muscle (actually four components are linked end-to-end to form the loop) in such a way that it can be resected into a longer version capable of controlling opening and closing the reshaped and larger mouth as before.


Then the commissures (lip corners) are cut to widen the mouth after the orbicularis muscle halves are protected in preparation of moving out to their new position beyond the ends of the new lip commissures (there are other steps involving protecting and moving blood vessels, salivary ducts, and nerves, but I won’t go into that detail here—leave that to the plastic surgeon!). After the orbicularis muscle halves are stitched together, the surgeon uses a combination of stretched regular lip vermillion and internal cheek mucous membranes to lengthen the lips and form a new mouth commissure. The surgeon will repeat this muscle lengthening and lip extending procedure on the opposite side of the mouth. Less extensive mouth widening surgery may not involve the orbicularus oris at all, or merely the innermost few millimeters that won’t be missed.
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The 22 year old woman in the pictures below was one of Dr. Eppley’s patients. She had a lip lift and a commissurotomy/commissuroplasty procedure. The lip lift shortened her lip to nose distance, intended to complement the mouth-widening procedure. I think the results are pretty good, even right out of surgery.
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A side view of the same woman before and just after surgery.
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The best part is the final picture. Another patient had this done, but the before and after pictures are about a year apart. This patient dyed her hair a different color than before her surgery, but this is definitely the same woman (Eppley site) in both images. Like the first woman, she also had a lip-lifting procedure as well as a commussurotomy/commissuroplasty (sorry, couldn’t find a face-on version of this image). The results look pretty good.
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It’s not only young women getting mouth widening surgery, but also older men such as this 60-year-old male who had his frowning expression repaired and mouth widened at the same time. This image is also from the Dr. Eppley site.
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In summary, you have two options:

A work-intensive non-surgical series of stretches and exercises can work, but without guaranteed results. If there are results, the method is very low cost, and you won’t have to endure healing from plastic surgery, but still have the fun of giving your friends a bigger smile than they have ever seen you have before. As already mentioned, you’ll also be much less prone to chapped lips (personal experience).

—or—

Plastic surgery. The cost is much higher, but maintenance is a breeze. You might just end up with a super-beautiful smile like the anonymous man in the first picture or like Julia Roberts', Cheryl Hines’, or Tim Borrmann’s nice naturally wide mouths, and not have to worry about stretching your mouth routinely to maintain the look.

I hope you find the way that works for you the best.

Good luck!

Edit (12/29/17): I have kept up my measurements of my mouth’s width over the past year. I started at a relaxed width of between 4.5–5.0 cm. I noticed about a month ago that my mouth is now 6.5 cm wide when relaxed closed and just tonight I noticed I’m starting to get closer to 7 cm wide following the curve of my lips with a flexible ruler. My goal is 7.5-8 cm wide minimum relaxed width and maybe 8.5 cm relaxed if I like the look, since my nose is 4.3 cm wide and the consensus on the ideal mouth to nose width ratio visually (public opinion surveys on what ratios appear the most beautiful to the eye) is the Golden Mean (or Golden Ratio) times nose width (4.5 x 1.618 = 7.3 cm; 5.0 x 1.618 = 8.1 cm).

I’ve been using the stretching method described in my answer above, but with my own designs of stretchers (see images recently added to the non-surgical method part of my answer) instead of the commercial splints also described and shown above.

The difference between mine and the others is that with mine your (relaxed) lips hold the mouth widening appliance in place rather than your sustained muscular efforts.

EDIT (2/12/18): I am now considering trying temporary lips filler injections near the lateral commissures of my mouth while stretched to 'test drive' a wider mouth to see if I actually would like how it changes my overall appearance and other people's reactions to me. Then I'll decide whether to do it permanently much wider than normal, slightly wider, or forget the whole idea altogether. It would be less expensive than surgery, but more effective than stretching alone.

11/27/18—no local options for test-drive lip injections. Currently stable at between 6.5–7.0 cm wide. Will update further if my situation changes.

Edit (6/21/19): Added a pre- and postoperative image of a 60 year old man’s widened mouth, showing that getting a wider smile isn’t just for young people.

Thanks all of you who have read my somewhat extensive answer, given me upvotes, and posted interesting and supportive comments and questions. I sincerely hope what I’ve written here will educate many more people on the plentiful surprising benefits and intrinsic beauty of getting a wider mouth.

If any of my readers gets a wider mouth and achieves a greater love for how he/she looks and becomes a happier person overall as a result, then my time writing this was worth it.

EDIT (10/30/19): I was just informed by one of my readers that he had gotten mouth widening plastic surgery a short time ago and is absolutely thrilled with the results. Now I know for sure it was worth it.

Edit (12/26/21): I realized that I had failed to mention one of the other benefits of the mouth-widening brace I describe in the main answer. Others that rely on the tension of elastic bands that pull on hooks at the corners of the mouth, while effective in stretching the lips, also apply enough pressure to the teeth that significant shifting toward the mouth interior might take place over time. If properly positioned and bent to the right curvature, the appliance described in the text above applies little or no pressure on the teeth while being correctly worn. I have amended some of my main answer accordingly.

Edit (4/16/22): Reworded some of my writing for readability, and added that I have further refined my mouth-widening appliance designs using different materials to make them more comfortable and effective.

 

[toaster123]

cope widemouth makes you look apeish its all about proportions cant believe online lookism discussions have existed for like a decade and your brains still cant wrap around that. are you trying to make a mouth that matches your monkey-brain?
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PS: HAVE FUN WITH SKIN THE QUALITY OF WRINKLY BALLSACKS AROUND YOUR MOUTH AT AGE 40

your right its not about mouth length its about mouth length to nose length ratio, which the op said. read next time

 

[2025 chad candidate]

Has anyone tried this shit and got results?

 

[Deleted member 24770]

Disclaimer!!! I wrote none of this, I just copy and pasted it from a Quora post while doing research since I had been planning to discuss this issue. I've seen talk on how to widen your mouth but nothing in a big thread like this. inb4 "muh plagiarism" or some bs like that, why would I waste my time when someone has already wasted it themselves? Save the autism and just read jfl

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 surprisingly many good reasons you might want a wider mouth beyond mere medical necessity.

Only recently has the horizontal width of our mouths been recognized as a much more significant factor in judgment of overall facial beauty by others than previously assumed.

A growing number of people are starting to take notice that mouths with lateral widths close to about 1.6 times the width of their noses (Golden Ratio) are the most aesthetically pleasing of all, in other words the most beautiful.

People of course want to be attractive, and after eyebrows and eyes, your mouth is one of your most visible facial features. Our lips’ color usually contrasts clearly with the coloration of the rest of our faces, so anything that can enhance their visual appeal should be quite welcome. Lips color changes from lipstick and procedures to thin or thicken lips have been used for a very long time to enhance beauty. A ratio of lower lip vertical width to upper lip vertical width of 1.6 is also ideal. Now the optimal horizontal width of your entire relaxed mouth (what it looks like when it’s closed with no voluntary effort to widen it) to nose ratio approaching 1.62:1 has been recognized as a very important contributing factor as well in overall perception of facial beauty for either gender.

According to a recent scholarly research article (statisticsfacpub) the neoclassical cannon (a widely recognized set of beauty rules) of the attractive mouth to nose ratio of 1.5:1 should be revised to 1.618:1, the famed Golden Ratio, since the study participants of both genders rated the latter ratio more beautiful for both genders, same and opposite sex, than 1.5:1 and much greater than 1.2:1 or lower. Perception of beauty also starts to drop off when the relaxed mouth to nose width ratio exceeds 1.8:1—so if your mouth to nose width ratio is already a little greater than 1.6:1, you’re still right at the top.

Above a 2:1 relaxed mouth to nose width ratio (measured straight across, not curved around your face) is perceived as more and more abnormal in appearance as it increases beyond this figure, so there’s no need to embrace your inner frog or Joker in your quest for a beautiful mouth.

However, when you are actually putting effort into a big smile your widened mouth to nose width ratio can briefly exceed 2:1 to over 2.5:1 and still look really striking in a very good way. As long as you frequently relax back to a ratio in the neighborhood of 1.6:1, you’ll remain on top of things in the facial aesthetics department..

To summarize, if your resting (relaxed neutral expression) mouth is from 1.5–1.8 times your nose width measured straight across (not following your facial curve with a flexible ruler), you’re pretty much set. If you were blessed with the right parents and grew up with a mouth to nose width ratio like this, then give God or nature a broad grateful smile and enjoy. Image below from Pinterest shows kids benefiting from having a wide-mouthed father, most obviously with the boy.
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The issue is that a large percentage of people naturally have much narrower mouths, ratios to nose width being 1.2 to less than 1.0, most often inherited from parents with similar oral to nasal measurements ratios. The study cited above indicates that perception of overall facial beauty is lower in people with mouths similar in width to their noses.

There are a lot of benefits that can come with your wider mouth (natural or otherwise), especially when it approaches the 1.6:1 golden ratio to your nose width. These are just some of them.

1. Easy, relaxed toothy ‘celebrity’ smile.
2. Better singing dynamics and projection. AMAZING YOUNG BOY singing - I will always love you // THE VOICE KIDS
3. Strong connection to being an effective and credible leader. People with wider mouths are better leaders
4. Enhanced ability to project intelligible speech at a higher volume over a greater distance.
5. Perception of greater generosity.Lips Shapes Meaning and Personality
6. Much more convenient and less painful access to the oral cavity for dental and orthodontic procedures.
7. Easier eating and drinking, especially if your original mouth was quite small.
8. Enhanced intimate activities—I’ll leave the details to the reader’s imagination.
9. Heightened overall impression of facial beauty (see reasons above and examples below).

Don’t despair if you currently have a narrow horizontal oral opening, with a non-ideal ratio to your nose width, because it turns out you aren’t necessarily stuck with the kind of mouth you were born with.

Thanks to modern plastic surgery methods that preserve normal mouth function with insignificant to almost no scarring, a wider mouth could be yours in a matter of a few hours at the clinic. It costs money to do this, though, and unless oral function is compromised by a narrow mouth, most insurance companies won’t cover this.

If the costs or worries about surgical complications are making you shy away from plastic surgery, don’t worry because there are two ways to visibly widen your mouth opening horizontally:

Non-surgical and surgical

It is possible to widen your mouth by manual methods, but it will take time and commitment with rather modest, yet clearly visible, results if you wish to do it without surgery. This will involve use of stretching exercises in certain key ways in conjunction with wearing a mouth-widening brace that helps sustain effective horizontal stretching for an extended period of time, necessary for it to be effective. Some of these techniques and devices will be described below.

I should know; the stretching method worked for me.

The other is surgical, adapted from methods developed for treating microstomia (a mouth opening that is abnormally small). This procedure is traditionally used for correcting congenital microstomia, or acquired microstomia through burns or disease. However, certain plastic surgeons (some in India, Mexico, South America, Europe, and several in the United States) are well-trained in adapting these surgical techniques for widening healthy narrow mouths using a procedure called a commissurotomy, followed by a commissuroplasty. The first procedure is the cutting procedure and the second is to establish new lateral commissures and rearrange the muscles on the enlarged mouth so scarring is minimal and the mouth remains fully functional. This method is described in greater detail later on in my answer.

Do you want a mouth as wide as the guy on the right in the picture below has, or a bit narrower like the woman?


What you want will make a difference in how realistic it might be to stick with non-surgical methods. The wider one will likely be achieved only by plastic surgery like the guy on the right had (I don’t know anything about the woman—sorry). The look works for this guy in my opinion—he had a palatal expander treatment, then decided on the mouth widening surgery to showcase his new and improved dentition. The woman’s palate is clearly narrower than the man’s and making her mouth much wider than it is might not be such a good idea since a wider smile would only show the insides of her cheeks in addition to her teeth. I other words mouth-widening beyond a certain point might not be appropriate for some people.

Cheryl Hines wide mouth looks really good on her—I believe hers is natural.



A wide mouth allows for showing a lot of teeth with even a casual smile.

Model Tim Borrmann rocks the wide mouth, too. His mouth to nose width ratio is pretty close to the ideal Golden Ratio (1.618…), supposedly the most visually appealing look of all. (Images from Pinterest). I measured {on my computer monitor} his mouth width in the picture below of 5.0 cm and nose width of 3.1 cm. 5.0/3.1 = 1.613:1 ratio.
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Who wouldn't want an amazing face with such pleasantly balanced features like this?
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Even relaxed, Tim’s mouth looks just perfect for his face.
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Of course the wrap around smile is the most obvious visible benefit of a nice wide mouth.

Now that you’re hooked on the idea of having a wider mouth your own, here are the options.

First, the non-surgical method:

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 side-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 encouraged to contract to shorter lengths to accommodate a wider smile for this to work (see picture below this one).



I developed my own mouth stretching apparatus with a unique shape and used it successfully to noticeably widen my 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 outside on sunlit snow.

Update 11/20/20: Make that four years without chapped lips.

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.

Edit (6/22/19). Due to increased interest I am now showing my favorite mouth stretcher design. This mouth-widening brace uses smoothed and highly polished 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.

Edit (4/15/22). I am working on further refinements of the mouth-widening brace design that now is cut with a water jet metal cutter from thin solid sheets of stainless steel (easier to cut, polish, shape, and keep clean) with horizontal rows of breath holes. All edges are smoothed and rounded by application of metalworking carborundum paper followed by stainless steel polish, as is the rest of the brace/appliance. The otherwise thin ends are then covered with thermoplastic so as to spread out the stretching force so even the most extreme stretching doesn’t result in injured lips, and allows tolerance of longer periods of wear.

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. (Update: the 10 cm one now also uses “boil and bite” mouthguard thermoplastic.) The perforations permit normal breathing and somewhat coherent speech while the brace is being worn. Due to the small size of the perforations, breathing through the appliance while it’s being worn produces a pleasant white sound rather than whistling or annoying hisses.

I’m also in the process of determining which horizontal hole pattern in the newer solid stainless steel sheet-cut ones produces the least amount of noise when breathed through (some prototypes’ breath holes actually whistle when breathed through—I personally think it’s fun, though I suspect most people wouldn’t want that).

While slightly slurred and sounding somewhat different from my normal appliance-free speech, if I substitute “n” for “m,” “d” for “b,” and “t” for “p,” moving my tongue as far forward as possible with the substitute consonants, and normal tongue position for words that actually use m, b, or p, my speech is fully intelligible for most listeners. To make the “f” sound, merely sending a puff of exhaled breath at the right moment through the perforations makes a passable phoneme. The letter “v” is just the voiced version of the “f” puffed breath adaptation. It took practice, but I can now talk on the phone and not have to remove the mouth-widening appliance.

Of course you can just take out the appliance/brace while you’re on the phone and put it back in your mouth when you’re done.

Here’s what the perforated stainless steel ones look like.

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Please excuse the so-so quality of my selfie. I was 57 when this picture was taken 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.

Another advantage to the design is the fact that if properly curved the middle part of the appliance applies little or no pressure on your front teeth. Thus, in widening your mouth this way, you won’t have to get orthodontic work done to move your teeth back forward to their proper position. The curvature has to be right; if too curved the appliance tends to come out of your mouth, and if not curved enough there will be some pressure on the teeth and gums. The wide part of the mouth-widening brace/appliance supports the upper and lower orbicularis oris muscles from behind on both the top and bottom and uses the pressure from the ends to keep the brace curved away from pressing on your teeth. If done right, a mouth-widening brace can be worn for minutes to hours without serious discomfort or danger of shifting your teeth, yet give your lips the sustained stretch you’re seeking.

Other stretchers that rely only on hooks and elastic for sustained pulling on the corners of the mouth pull the lips tightly against the teeth. The sustained pressure over time will likely push the teeth so they shift backward toward the mouth’s interior. You do not want that.
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If anyone wants something like this, let me know by sending me a message. 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. Before I started 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—most of these caused pressure on my teeth so I abandoned them).

Edit (4/16/22): My current measurements are a bit over 6.0 cm wide measured straight across, 7.0+ cm if I follow the curve of my lips with a flexible ruler, and my maximum forced smile with cheek muscle efforts alone is 9 cm measured straight across and 11 cm if I follow the curve of my lips. When viewed from the sides, I can see my upper first molars while doing my widest smile.

This shows 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).
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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 58).

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. The mouth-widening braces by the time you’ve reached that point are usually comfortable enough to wear for an hour or more without any discomfort; you may even be able to sleep wearing one. I have slept wearing one maybe a half an inch or 1 cm shorter than my “therapeutic” one that still actively stretches my lips beyond normal.

Update 2/13/20: I realized that side views don’t tell my own story adequately, so I found two “Photo Booth” pictures I had taken a bit over three years apart. One was taken July 7th 2016 before I had started my own mouth-widening project. The other was taken November 13th 2019. I sized the images so they’re at the same scale, though the resolution and lighting is a bit different. Notice in the first image my mouth is only a tiny bit wider than my nose. I didn’t like how my mouth to nose width ratio looked in this and other pictures taken of me prior to then, hence the inspiration for my mouth-widening project.
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Now take a look at the next image taken three years later. My face is just as relaxed as it was in the first image—or else my nose and face shape would have been different. Notice that I have no more wrinkles or sagging on the corners of my mouth despite the stretching, yet it’s obviously visibly wider—and I’m now 58.
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f my appliances hadn’t worked on me, I would never have mentioned them, since I don’t exactly feel like embarrassing myself in front of over 300k readers (so far). I believe in them because they work, and I have made more progress (without giving myself sagging wrinkles, lips, or other damage) in a year with this design than with any other appliance I’ve come up with.

I have made additional progress in the couple of months since then, as I have since made and currently use a 12 cm appliance (it’s of course a tight fit as expected); I can now force-smile widely enough while wearing the 10 cm appliance to permit it to fall out of my mouth with a slight tongue push. My mouth is as of today between 6–6.5 cm wide straight across, and if I follow the curve of my lips around the front of my face, it’s between 6.5 and 7 cm as of February 13th, 2020. My nose is still 4.2 cm wide. The mouth to nose width ratio range is from 1.55 to 1.67 for the curve following measurement, meaning the average is 1.61, almost exactly the Golden Ratio—my goal.

Another person who'd answered this question in 2018 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.

Surgical Method:

Note: I’m not connected in any way to Dr. Eppley or anyone else referenced, and do not receive (nor have asked for) any sort of compensation or personal gain from anyone. I’m just motivated by the opportunity to pass on what I’ve learned about the surprisingly large number of benefits of getting a mouth width to nose width ratio of 1.6:1 and how to actually get it done for ourselves.

Most of the surgical results images and methods I describe and show below are either from “Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery” by Maria Z. Siemionow and Marita Eisenmann-Klein or the Dr. Barry Eppley website for his Plastic Surgery clinic in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA: Cosmetic Plastic Surgeon Indianapolis IN | Dr. Barry Eppley

The object of this surgery is to change not only the opening of your mouth, but also move and resection the muscles so that they can accommodate your new wider oral opening and lengthened lips without any unusual conscious effort.

The only negative I can immediately think of is if you don’t manually stretch your mouth width, any tendency toward chapped lips you had before surgery will likely be the same as before, or maybe worse near the newly extended corners of your mouth.

The scariest part for me is the fact that if you wish to get a significantly wider mouth (2 to 6 cm wider), you have to allow the surgeon to cut the ring-shaped orbicularis oris muscle (actually four components are linked end-to-end to form the loop) in such a way that it can be resected into a longer version capable of controlling opening and closing the reshaped and larger mouth as before.


Then the commissures (lip corners) are cut to widen the mouth after the orbicularis muscle halves are protected in preparation of moving out to their new position beyond the ends of the new lip commissures (there are other steps involving protecting and moving blood vessels, salivary ducts, and nerves, but I won’t go into that detail here—leave that to the plastic surgeon!). After the orbicularis muscle halves are stitched together, the surgeon uses a combination of stretched regular lip vermillion and internal cheek mucous membranes to lengthen the lips and form a new mouth commissure. The surgeon will repeat this muscle lengthening and lip extending procedure on the opposite side of the mouth. Less extensive mouth widening surgery may not involve the orbicularus oris at all, or merely the innermost few millimeters that won’t be missed.
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The 22 year old woman in the pictures below was one of Dr. Eppley’s patients. She had a lip lift and a commissurotomy/commissuroplasty procedure. The lip lift shortened her lip to nose distance, intended to complement the mouth-widening procedure. I think the results are pretty good, even right out of surgery.
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A side view of the same woman before and just after surgery.
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The best part is the final picture. Another patient had this done, but the before and after pictures are about a year apart. This patient dyed her hair a different color than before her surgery, but this is definitely the same woman (Eppley site) in both images. Like the first woman, she also had a lip-lifting procedure as well as a commussurotomy/commissuroplasty (sorry, couldn’t find a face-on version of this image). The results look pretty good.
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It’s not only young women getting mouth widening surgery, but also older men such as this 60-year-old male who had his frowning expression repaired and mouth widened at the same time. This image is also from the Dr. Eppley site.
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In summary, you have two options:

A work-intensive non-surgical series of stretches and exercises can work, but without guaranteed results. If there are results, the method is very low cost, and you won’t have to endure healing from plastic surgery, but still have the fun of giving your friends a bigger smile than they have ever seen you have before. As already mentioned, you’ll also be much less prone to chapped lips (personal experience).

—or—

Plastic surgery. The cost is much higher, but maintenance is a breeze. You might just end up with a super-beautiful smile like the anonymous man in the first picture or like Julia Roberts', Cheryl Hines’, or Tim Borrmann’s nice naturally wide mouths, and not have to worry about stretching your mouth routinely to maintain the look.

I hope you find the way that works for you the best.

Good luck!

Edit (12/29/17): I have kept up my measurements of my mouth’s width over the past year. I started at a relaxed width of between 4.5–5.0 cm. I noticed about a month ago that my mouth is now 6.5 cm wide when relaxed closed and just tonight I noticed I’m starting to get closer to 7 cm wide following the curve of my lips with a flexible ruler. My goal is 7.5-8 cm wide minimum relaxed width and maybe 8.5 cm relaxed if I like the look, since my nose is 4.3 cm wide and the consensus on the ideal mouth to nose width ratio visually (public opinion surveys on what ratios appear the most beautiful to the eye) is the Golden Mean (or Golden Ratio) times nose width (4.5 x 1.618 = 7.3 cm; 5.0 x 1.618 = 8.1 cm).

I’ve been using the stretching method described in my answer above, but with my own designs of stretchers (see images recently added to the non-surgical method part of my answer) instead of the commercial splints also described and shown above.

The difference between mine and the others is that with mine your (relaxed) lips hold the mouth widening appliance in place rather than your sustained muscular efforts.

EDIT (2/12/18): I am now considering trying temporary lips filler injections near the lateral commissures of my mouth while stretched to 'test drive' a wider mouth to see if I actually would like how it changes my overall appearance and other people's reactions to me. Then I'll decide whether to do it permanently much wider than normal, slightly wider, or forget the whole idea altogether. It would be less expensive than surgery, but more effective than stretching alone.

11/27/18—no local options for test-drive lip injections. Currently stable at between 6.5–7.0 cm wide. Will update further if my situation changes.

Edit (6/21/19): Added a pre- and postoperative image of a 60 year old man’s widened mouth, showing that getting a wider smile isn’t just for young people.

Thanks all of you who have read my somewhat extensive answer, given me upvotes, and posted interesting and supportive comments and questions. I sincerely hope what I’ve written here will educate many more people on the plentiful surprising benefits and intrinsic beauty of getting a wider mouth.

If any of my readers gets a wider mouth and achieves a greater love for how he/she looks and becomes a happier person overall as a result, then my time writing this was worth it.

EDIT (10/30/19): I was just informed by one of my readers that he had gotten mouth widening plastic surgery a short time ago and is absolutely thrilled with the results. Now I know for sure it was worth it.

Edit (12/26/21): I realized that I had failed to mention one of the other benefits of the mouth-widening brace I describe in the main answer. Others that rely on the tension of elastic bands that pull on hooks at the corners of the mouth, while effective in stretching the lips, also apply enough pressure to the teeth that significant shifting toward the mouth interior might take place over time. If properly positioned and bent to the right curvature, the appliance described in the text above applies little or no pressure on the teeth while being correctly worn. I have amended some of my main answer accordingly.

Edit (4/16/22): Reworded some of my writing for readability, and added that I have further refined my mouth-widening appliance designs using different materials to make them more comfortable and effective.

Stopped reading at golden ratio bullshit, definitely chatgpt. Garbage thread, I literally had a math fair project on golden ratio so I know anyone who has to say because muh golden ratio is talking shit. It was such a meme doing that project JFL

 

[infini]

Stopped reading at golden ratio bullshit, definitely chatgpt. Garbage thread, I literally had a math fair project on golden ratio so I know anyone who has to say because muh golden ratio is talking shit. It was such a meme doing that project JFL

@ReadBooksEveryday I had to stop reading this fucking saga once I read he was 57 and saw the photos.

 

[jagmogs1000]

Disclaimer!!! I wrote none of this, I just copy and pasted it from a Quora post while doing research since I had been planning to discuss this issue. I've seen talk on how to widen your mouth but nothing in a big thread like this. inb4 "muh plagiarism" or some bs like that, why would I waste my time when someone has already wasted it themselves? Save the autism and just read jfl

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 surprisingly many good reasons you might want a wider mouth beyond mere medical necessity.

Only recently has the horizontal width of our mouths been recognized as a much more significant factor in judgment of overall facial beauty by others than previously assumed.

A growing number of people are starting to take notice that mouths with lateral widths close to about 1.6 times the width of their noses (Golden Ratio) are the most aesthetically pleasing of all, in other words the most beautiful.

People of course want to be attractive, and after eyebrows and eyes, your mouth is one of your most visible facial features. Our lips’ color usually contrasts clearly with the coloration of the rest of our faces, so anything that can enhance their visual appeal should be quite welcome. Lips color changes from lipstick and procedures to thin or thicken lips have been used for a very long time to enhance beauty. A ratio of lower lip vertical width to upper lip vertical width of 1.6 is also ideal. Now the optimal horizontal width of your entire relaxed mouth (what it looks like when it’s closed with no voluntary effort to widen it) to nose ratio approaching 1.62:1 has been recognized as a very important contributing factor as well in overall perception of facial beauty for either gender.

According to a recent scholarly research article (statisticsfacpub) the neoclassical cannon (a widely recognized set of beauty rules) of the attractive mouth to nose ratio of 1.5:1 should be revised to 1.618:1, the famed Golden Ratio, since the study participants of both genders rated the latter ratio more beautiful for both genders, same and opposite sex, than 1.5:1 and much greater than 1.2:1 or lower. Perception of beauty also starts to drop off when the relaxed mouth to nose width ratio exceeds 1.8:1—so if your mouth to nose width ratio is already a little greater than 1.6:1, you’re still right at the top.

Above a 2:1 relaxed mouth to nose width ratio (measured straight across, not curved around your face) is perceived as more and more abnormal in appearance as it increases beyond this figure, so there’s no need to embrace your inner frog or Joker in your quest for a beautiful mouth.

However, when you are actually putting effort into a big smile your widened mouth to nose width ratio can briefly exceed 2:1 to over 2.5:1 and still look really striking in a very good way. As long as you frequently relax back to a ratio in the neighborhood of 1.6:1, you’ll remain on top of things in the facial aesthetics department..

To summarize, if your resting (relaxed neutral expression) mouth is from 1.5–1.8 times your nose width measured straight across (not following your facial curve with a flexible ruler), you’re pretty much set. If you were blessed with the right parents and grew up with a mouth to nose width ratio like this, then give God or nature a broad grateful smile and enjoy. Image below from Pinterest shows kids benefiting from having a wide-mouthed father, most obviously with the boy.
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The issue is that a large percentage of people naturally have much narrower mouths, ratios to nose width being 1.2 to less than 1.0, most often inherited from parents with similar oral to nasal measurements ratios. The study cited above indicates that perception of overall facial beauty is lower in people with mouths similar in width to their noses.

There are a lot of benefits that can come with your wider mouth (natural or otherwise), especially when it approaches the 1.6:1 golden ratio to your nose width. These are just some of them.

1. Easy, relaxed toothy ‘celebrity’ smile.
2. Better singing dynamics and projection. AMAZING YOUNG BOY singing - I will always love you // THE VOICE KIDS
3. Strong connection to being an effective and credible leader. People with wider mouths are better leaders
4. Enhanced ability to project intelligible speech at a higher volume over a greater distance.
5. Perception of greater generosity.Lips Shapes Meaning and Personality
6. Much more convenient and less painful access to the oral cavity for dental and orthodontic procedures.
7. Easier eating and drinking, especially if your original mouth was quite small.
8. Enhanced intimate activities—I’ll leave the details to the reader’s imagination.
9. Heightened overall impression of facial beauty (see reasons above and examples below).

Don’t despair if you currently have a narrow horizontal oral opening, with a non-ideal ratio to your nose width, because it turns out you aren’t necessarily stuck with the kind of mouth you were born with.

Thanks to modern plastic surgery methods that preserve normal mouth function with insignificant to almost no scarring, a wider mouth could be yours in a matter of a few hours at the clinic. It costs money to do this, though, and unless oral function is compromised by a narrow mouth, most insurance companies won’t cover this.

If the costs or worries about surgical complications are making you shy away from plastic surgery, don’t worry because there are two ways to visibly widen your mouth opening horizontally:

Non-surgical and surgical

It is possible to widen your mouth by manual methods, but it will take time and commitment with rather modest, yet clearly visible, results if you wish to do it without surgery. This will involve use of stretching exercises in certain key ways in conjunction with wearing a mouth-widening brace that helps sustain effective horizontal stretching for an extended period of time, necessary for it to be effective. Some of these techniques and devices will be described below.

I should know; the stretching method worked for me.

The other is surgical, adapted from methods developed for treating microstomia (a mouth opening that is abnormally small). This procedure is traditionally used for correcting congenital microstomia, or acquired microstomia through burns or disease. However, certain plastic surgeons (some in India, Mexico, South America, Europe, and several in the United States) are well-trained in adapting these surgical techniques for widening healthy narrow mouths using a procedure called a commissurotomy, followed by a commissuroplasty. The first procedure is the cutting procedure and the second is to establish new lateral commissures and rearrange the muscles on the enlarged mouth so scarring is minimal and the mouth remains fully functional. This method is described in greater detail later on in my answer.

Do you want a mouth as wide as the guy on the right in the picture below has, or a bit narrower like the woman?


What you want will make a difference in how realistic it might be to stick with non-surgical methods. The wider one will likely be achieved only by plastic surgery like the guy on the right had (I don’t know anything about the woman—sorry). The look works for this guy in my opinion—he had a palatal expander treatment, then decided on the mouth widening surgery to showcase his new and improved dentition. The woman’s palate is clearly narrower than the man’s and making her mouth much wider than it is might not be such a good idea since a wider smile would only show the insides of her cheeks in addition to her teeth. I other words mouth-widening beyond a certain point might not be appropriate for some people.

Cheryl Hines wide mouth looks really good on her—I believe hers is natural.



A wide mouth allows for showing a lot of teeth with even a casual smile.

Model Tim Borrmann rocks the wide mouth, too. His mouth to nose width ratio is pretty close to the ideal Golden Ratio (1.618…), supposedly the most visually appealing look of all. (Images from Pinterest). I measured {on my computer monitor} his mouth width in the picture below of 5.0 cm and nose width of 3.1 cm. 5.0/3.1 = 1.613:1 ratio.
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Who wouldn't want an amazing face with such pleasantly balanced features like this?
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Even relaxed, Tim’s mouth looks just perfect for his face.
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Of course the wrap around smile is the most obvious visible benefit of a nice wide mouth.

Now that you’re hooked on the idea of having a wider mouth your own, here are the options.

First, the non-surgical method:

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 side-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 encouraged to contract to shorter lengths to accommodate a wider smile for this to work (see picture below this one).



I developed my own mouth stretching apparatus with a unique shape and used it successfully to noticeably widen my 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 outside on sunlit snow.

Update 11/20/20: Make that four years without chapped lips.

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.

Edit (6/22/19). Due to increased interest I am now showing my favorite mouth stretcher design. This mouth-widening brace uses smoothed and highly polished 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.

Edit (4/15/22). I am working on further refinements of the mouth-widening brace design that now is cut with a water jet metal cutter from thin solid sheets of stainless steel (easier to cut, polish, shape, and keep clean) with horizontal rows of breath holes. All edges are smoothed and rounded by application of metalworking carborundum paper followed by stainless steel polish, as is the rest of the brace/appliance. The otherwise thin ends are then covered with thermoplastic so as to spread out the stretching force so even the most extreme stretching doesn’t result in injured lips, and allows tolerance of longer periods of wear.

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. (Update: the 10 cm one now also uses “boil and bite” mouthguard thermoplastic.) The perforations permit normal breathing and somewhat coherent speech while the brace is being worn. Due to the small size of the perforations, breathing through the appliance while it’s being worn produces a pleasant white sound rather than whistling or annoying hisses.

I’m also in the process of determining which horizontal hole pattern in the newer solid stainless steel sheet-cut ones produces the least amount of noise when breathed through (some prototypes’ breath holes actually whistle when breathed through—I personally think it’s fun, though I suspect most people wouldn’t want that).

While slightly slurred and sounding somewhat different from my normal appliance-free speech, if I substitute “n” for “m,” “d” for “b,” and “t” for “p,” moving my tongue as far forward as possible with the substitute consonants, and normal tongue position for words that actually use m, b, or p, my speech is fully intelligible for most listeners. To make the “f” sound, merely sending a puff of exhaled breath at the right moment through the perforations makes a passable phoneme. The letter “v” is just the voiced version of the “f” puffed breath adaptation. It took practice, but I can now talk on the phone and not have to remove the mouth-widening appliance.

Of course you can just take out the appliance/brace while you’re on the phone and put it back in your mouth when you’re done.

Here’s what the perforated stainless steel ones look like.

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Please excuse the so-so quality of my selfie. I was 57 when this picture was taken 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.

Another advantage to the design is the fact that if properly curved the middle part of the appliance applies little or no pressure on your front teeth. Thus, in widening your mouth this way, you won’t have to get orthodontic work done to move your teeth back forward to their proper position. The curvature has to be right; if too curved the appliance tends to come out of your mouth, and if not curved enough there will be some pressure on the teeth and gums. The wide part of the mouth-widening brace/appliance supports the upper and lower orbicularis oris muscles from behind on both the top and bottom and uses the pressure from the ends to keep the brace curved away from pressing on your teeth. If done right, a mouth-widening brace can be worn for minutes to hours without serious discomfort or danger of shifting your teeth, yet give your lips the sustained stretch you’re seeking.

Other stretchers that rely only on hooks and elastic for sustained pulling on the corners of the mouth pull the lips tightly against the teeth. The sustained pressure over time will likely push the teeth so they shift backward toward the mouth’s interior. You do not want that.
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If anyone wants something like this, let me know by sending me a message. 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. Before I started 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—most of these caused pressure on my teeth so I abandoned them).

Edit (4/16/22): My current measurements are a bit over 6.0 cm wide measured straight across, 7.0+ cm if I follow the curve of my lips with a flexible ruler, and my maximum forced smile with cheek muscle efforts alone is 9 cm measured straight across and 11 cm if I follow the curve of my lips. When viewed from the sides, I can see my upper first molars while doing my widest smile.

This shows 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).
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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 58).

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. The mouth-widening braces by the time you’ve reached that point are usually comfortable enough to wear for an hour or more without any discomfort; you may even be able to sleep wearing one. I have slept wearing one maybe a half an inch or 1 cm shorter than my “therapeutic” one that still actively stretches my lips beyond normal.

Update 2/13/20: I realized that side views don’t tell my own story adequately, so I found two “Photo Booth” pictures I had taken a bit over three years apart. One was taken July 7th 2016 before I had started my own mouth-widening project. The other was taken November 13th 2019. I sized the images so they’re at the same scale, though the resolution and lighting is a bit different. Notice in the first image my mouth is only a tiny bit wider than my nose. I didn’t like how my mouth to nose width ratio looked in this and other pictures taken of me prior to then, hence the inspiration for my mouth-widening project.
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Now take a look at the next image taken three years later. My face is just as relaxed as it was in the first image—or else my nose and face shape would have been different. Notice that I have no more wrinkles or sagging on the corners of my mouth despite the stretching, yet it’s obviously visibly wider—and I’m now 58.
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f my appliances hadn’t worked on me, I would never have mentioned them, since I don’t exactly feel like embarrassing myself in front of over 300k readers (so far). I believe in them because they work, and I have made more progress (without giving myself sagging wrinkles, lips, or other damage) in a year with this design than with any other appliance I’ve come up with.

I have made additional progress in the couple of months since then, as I have since made and currently use a 12 cm appliance (it’s of course a tight fit as expected); I can now force-smile widely enough while wearing the 10 cm appliance to permit it to fall out of my mouth with a slight tongue push. My mouth is as of today between 6–6.5 cm wide straight across, and if I follow the curve of my lips around the front of my face, it’s between 6.5 and 7 cm as of February 13th, 2020. My nose is still 4.2 cm wide. The mouth to nose width ratio range is from 1.55 to 1.67 for the curve following measurement, meaning the average is 1.61, almost exactly the Golden Ratio—my goal.

Another person who'd answered this question in 2018 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.

Surgical Method:

Note: I’m not connected in any way to Dr. Eppley or anyone else referenced, and do not receive (nor have asked for) any sort of compensation or personal gain from anyone. I’m just motivated by the opportunity to pass on what I’ve learned about the surprisingly large number of benefits of getting a mouth width to nose width ratio of 1.6:1 and how to actually get it done for ourselves.

Most of the surgical results images and methods I describe and show below are either from “Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery” by Maria Z. Siemionow and Marita Eisenmann-Klein or the Dr. Barry Eppley website for his Plastic Surgery clinic in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA: Cosmetic Plastic Surgeon Indianapolis IN | Dr. Barry Eppley

The object of this surgery is to change not only the opening of your mouth, but also move and resection the muscles so that they can accommodate your new wider oral opening and lengthened lips without any unusual conscious effort.

The only negative I can immediately think of is if you don’t manually stretch your mouth width, any tendency toward chapped lips you had before surgery will likely be the same as before, or maybe worse near the newly extended corners of your mouth.

The scariest part for me is the fact that if you wish to get a significantly wider mouth (2 to 6 cm wider), you have to allow the surgeon to cut the ring-shaped orbicularis oris muscle (actually four components are linked end-to-end to form the loop) in such a way that it can be resected into a longer version capable of controlling opening and closing the reshaped and larger mouth as before.


Then the commissures (lip corners) are cut to widen the mouth after the orbicularis muscle halves are protected in preparation of moving out to their new position beyond the ends of the new lip commissures (there are other steps involving protecting and moving blood vessels, salivary ducts, and nerves, but I won’t go into that detail here—leave that to the plastic surgeon!). After the orbicularis muscle halves are stitched together, the surgeon uses a combination of stretched regular lip vermillion and internal cheek mucous membranes to lengthen the lips and form a new mouth commissure. The surgeon will repeat this muscle lengthening and lip extending procedure on the opposite side of the mouth. Less extensive mouth widening surgery may not involve the orbicularus oris at all, or merely the innermost few millimeters that won’t be missed.
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The 22 year old woman in the pictures below was one of Dr. Eppley’s patients. She had a lip lift and a commissurotomy/commissuroplasty procedure. The lip lift shortened her lip to nose distance, intended to complement the mouth-widening procedure. I think the results are pretty good, even right out of surgery.
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A side view of the same woman before and just after surgery.
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The best part is the final picture. Another patient had this done, but the before and after pictures are about a year apart. This patient dyed her hair a different color than before her surgery, but this is definitely the same woman (Eppley site) in both images. Like the first woman, she also had a lip-lifting procedure as well as a commussurotomy/commissuroplasty (sorry, couldn’t find a face-on version of this image). The results look pretty good.
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It’s not only young women getting mouth widening surgery, but also older men such as this 60-year-old male who had his frowning expression repaired and mouth widened at the same time. This image is also from the Dr. Eppley site.
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In summary, you have two options:

A work-intensive non-surgical series of stretches and exercises can work, but without guaranteed results. If there are results, the method is very low cost, and you won’t have to endure healing from plastic surgery, but still have the fun of giving your friends a bigger smile than they have ever seen you have before. As already mentioned, you’ll also be much less prone to chapped lips (personal experience).

—or—

Plastic surgery. The cost is much higher, but maintenance is a breeze. You might just end up with a super-beautiful smile like the anonymous man in the first picture or like Julia Roberts', Cheryl Hines’, or Tim Borrmann’s nice naturally wide mouths, and not have to worry about stretching your mouth routinely to maintain the look.

I hope you find the way that works for you the best.

Good luck!

Edit (12/29/17): I have kept up my measurements of my mouth’s width over the past year. I started at a relaxed width of between 4.5–5.0 cm. I noticed about a month ago that my mouth is now 6.5 cm wide when relaxed closed and just tonight I noticed I’m starting to get closer to 7 cm wide following the curve of my lips with a flexible ruler. My goal is 7.5-8 cm wide minimum relaxed width and maybe 8.5 cm relaxed if I like the look, since my nose is 4.3 cm wide and the consensus on the ideal mouth to nose width ratio visually (public opinion surveys on what ratios appear the most beautiful to the eye) is the Golden Mean (or Golden Ratio) times nose width (4.5 x 1.618 = 7.3 cm; 5.0 x 1.618 = 8.1 cm).

I’ve been using the stretching method described in my answer above, but with my own designs of stretchers (see images recently added to the non-surgical method part of my answer) instead of the commercial splints also described and shown above.

The difference between mine and the others is that with mine your (relaxed) lips hold the mouth widening appliance in place rather than your sustained muscular efforts.

EDIT (2/12/18): I am now considering trying temporary lips filler injections near the lateral commissures of my mouth while stretched to 'test drive' a wider mouth to see if I actually would like how it changes my overall appearance and other people's reactions to me. Then I'll decide whether to do it permanently much wider than normal, slightly wider, or forget the whole idea altogether. It would be less expensive than surgery, but more effective than stretching alone.

11/27/18—no local options for test-drive lip injections. Currently stable at between 6.5–7.0 cm wide. Will update further if my situation changes.

Edit (6/21/19): Added a pre- and postoperative image of a 60 year old man’s widened mouth, showing that getting a wider smile isn’t just for young people.

Thanks all of you who have read my somewhat extensive answer, given me upvotes, and posted interesting and supportive comments and questions. I sincerely hope what I’ve written here will educate many more people on the plentiful surprising benefits and intrinsic beauty of getting a wider mouth.

If any of my readers gets a wider mouth and achieves a greater love for how he/she looks and becomes a happier person overall as a result, then my time writing this was worth it.

EDIT (10/30/19): I was just informed by one of my readers that he had gotten mouth widening plastic surgery a short time ago and is absolutely thrilled with the results. Now I know for sure it was worth it.

Edit (12/26/21): I realized that I had failed to mention one of the other benefits of the mouth-widening brace I describe in the main answer. Others that rely on the tension of elastic bands that pull on hooks at the corners of the mouth, while effective in stretching the lips, also apply enough pressure to the teeth that significant shifting toward the mouth interior might take place over time. If properly positioned and bent to the right curvature, the appliance described in the text above applies little or no pressure on the teeth while being correctly worn. I have amended some of my main answer accordingly.

Edit (4/16/22): Reworded some of my writing for readability, and added that I have further refined my mouth-widening appliance designs using different materials to make them more comfortable and effective.