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How to photograph your own crown

Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by the Crown team

The crown is the zone most likely to be changing and the only one you cannot check in a mirror. That is not a coincidence — it is why it goes unnoticed for years. Here is how to actually get the shot.

Everything in the hairline guide still applies — light, distance, hair state, timing. This page is about the part that is specific to the crown: you are aiming a camera at something you cannot see, which means the ordinary feedback loop of framing a photo is gone.

Four methods, worst to best

1. Blind overhead — works, barely

   Rear camera, phone held above and behind your head, pointed down at the top of your skull, fired with the volume button. You cannot see the frame, so take five or six and keep the best.

   The problem: nothing about it is repeatable. Your arm lands in a slightly different place every time, and arm position is camera angle. Use this only if nothing else is available.

2. Front camera over the head

   Same position, but using the front camera so you can see the screen — except you cannot, because the screen is now facing away from you. Some people manage it against a mirror.

   Slightly better than blind, still not repeatable.

3. The two-mirror method — genuinely good

   This is the one most people do not know. Stand with your back to a large mirror and hold a second mirror (a hand mirror, or a phone in a shiny case) in front of you, angled so the back of your head appears in it. You can now see your own crown. Most bathroom cabinets with a hinged mirrored door give you the same thing for free — swing the door out to about 45° and the two surfaces do the work.

   Why it wins: you get live feedback. You can see what the camera will see, aim properly, and reproduce it next month. Shoot the reflection in the far mirror with your rear camera.

4. Prop the phone and use the timer — best

   Put the phone somewhere higher than your head — a shelf, a cabinet top, on top of a stack of books — angled down. Set a 10-second timer, get into position under it, and hold still. Or ask someone; a second person is the most repeatable option that exists.

   Why it wins: the camera position is fixed by furniture rather than by your arm, so next month's photo can be taken from the identical spot. Mark the spot if you can.

The two things that wreck a crown photo

Your part

This is the crown's equivalent of chin tilt, and it is worse. A part opened a few millimetres wider exposes a stripe of scalp and can look like a season of change. Parting your hair on the other side, or combing it flat versus letting it sit, produces two completely different crowns.

Do this: pick one state — most people should pick "as it falls naturally, unparted and untouched" — and do not touch your hair before the photo. Not even to tidy it. Especially not to tidy it.

The aim angle

A crown shot taken at 45° from behind foreshortens the whole area: the hair at the back of the whorl lies toward the camera and covers what is behind it, so the crown reads as fuller than it is. A shot aimed straight down at the vertex sees the actual area.

Do this: aim down at the top of the head, not along the back of it. If you can see much of your neck or your back in the frame, the camera is too low.

Light, for the crown specifically

Overhead light is bad here for a different reason than it is bad for the hairline: whatever is holding the camera — your arm, your head itself — casts a shadow directly across the vertex, which is the exact area being measured.

Diffuse ambient daylight is best. Failing that, position yourself so the light comes from in front of and above you at an angle, rather than from straight overhead, and check the resulting photo for a hard shadow line before you accept it.

How to know you got it

Why it matters more than the hairline shot

In Crown, two of the seven appearance metrics — coverage and show-through — can only be read from the crown shot, and the crown zone itself is never scored from a front photo. Skip this shot and you lose the crown score plus two metrics, and Crown will return blanks for all three rather than estimate them.

There is also a plainer reason. The front of your head is the part you check in the mirror every day, so you already have years of informal data on it. The crown is the part you have never once looked at. It is the only zone where a photograph tells you something you do not already know.

Common questions

Keep reading

• How to photograph your own hairlineThe five variables to hold fixed so that two photos taken months apart are actually comparable.
• How to tell a usable hair photo from a bad oneA fifteen-second checklist, plus the failure an automatic check can never catch.
• Hairline, temples, crown: why one number hides threeThe three zones move independently. What it means when they disagree, and which disagreements are photo artifacts.