People ask us about this often enough that it deserves a real answer rather than an eye roll.
So here is the honest one, and it is a split. The resting posture mewing describes is real, and we teach it. The promise attached to it, that holding your tongue on the roof of your mouth will restructure an adult face, is not supported by anything, and the way the technique gets practiced online is how people hurt their teeth and miss the thing that actually needed treating.
Both halves of that matter. Dismissing the whole thing is as unhelpful as believing the marketing.
What mewing actually asks you to do
Strip away the branding and the instruction is four things:
- Rest the whole tongue against the roof of your mouth, not just the tip
- Keep your lips closed without effort
- Keep your teeth lightly apart rather than clenched
- Breathe through your nose
If you have read anything else on this site, that list should look familiar. It is the same resting posture we describe in mouth breathing, in teeth shifting after braces, and in jaw clenching. It is the target of myofunctional therapy, which is a recognized clinical discipline with training, certification and a body of published research behind it.
The posture is not the problem. The posture is the part mewing got right, and it did not invent it. What is contested is everything claimed downstream of it.
The line that decides everything: are you still growing?
Almost every argument about mewing collapses once you separate these two groups, and almost nobody online separates them.
| A growing child | A skeletally mature adult | |
|---|---|---|
| The bones | Actively forming. The palate is still widening and the sutures have not fused | Formed. The midface does not remodel from soft tissue pressure |
| Tongue influence | Genuine. A tongue resting on the palate helps shape the upper arch during development | Effectively none on bone |
| What can still change | Arch width, and how the jaws grow relative to each other | Muscle tone, tooth position, swelling, and posture of the head and neck |
| Who should supervise it | A clinician, because this is the window that does not come back | A clinician, because at this age force moves teeth rather than bone |
That middle row is the whole argument. In a growing child, tongue posture is a real developmental input, and a tongue that sits low is associated with a narrower palate and a longer face. That is standard orthodontic understanding and we look for it at every child exam.
In an adult, the sutures have fused. Sustained pressure from a tongue does not widen a fused maxilla. What it can do is move teeth, because moving teeth with sustained gentle force is precisely how orthodontics works.
This is the part that should give you pause. The mechanism people are counting on to reshape their face is the same mechanism that moves teeth. If mewing were strong enough to do the first thing, it would certainly be doing the second, and the second is not always something you want.
What the evidence actually says
We will be plain about this, because the honest answer is unusually simple.
There are no clinical trials of mewing. Not weak ones, not mixed ones. There is no body of trial evidence to summarize, which is why you will not find a systematic review of it either. The peer-reviewed literature that mentions mewing by name largely examines it as a social media phenomenon rather than as a treatment that has been tested.
In January 2024 the American Association of Orthodontists issued a formal warning about the trend. Their position lands in the same place this page does: proper tongue posture genuinely matters for oral health and development, but mewing “oversimplifies the complexities of facial structure,” there is no scientific evidence behind the jawline claims, and the risks outweigh the unproven benefits. The specific harms they name are chronic pressure loosening teeth, shifting the bite, causing tooth wear, and in some cases affecting speech.
American Association of Orthodontists statement, January 23, 2024. Lee U, Graves L, Friedlander A. Mewing: social media’s alternative to orthognathic surgery? J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2019;77:1743-1744.
Set that against myofunctional therapy, which targets the same posture and has actually been studied. Even there we would rather understate it: the strongest evidence is in sleep apnea, meta-analyses show clear improvement in snoring and daytime sleepiness, analyses restricted to randomized trials have been more equivocal on the apnea index itself, and roughly half of people respond strongly while the rest barely move.
That is what a modest, real evidence base looks like. It is not thrilling. It is considerably better than nothing, which is what sits behind the facial restructuring claim.
Why the before and after photos are not evidence
This is worth its own section, because the photos are what convince people, and almost every variable in them is easier to change than a jawbone.
- Camera height. Shooting from slightly below sharpens a jawline. Shooting from above erases one. This single variable produces more dramatic before and after pairs than anything else on this list.
- Head position. Extending the neck and pushing the chin forward tightens the tissue under the jaw. It is a pose, and it takes no months of practice.
- Tensing. Clenching the jaw muscles for the second photo visibly changes the outline. So does swallowing and holding it.
- Lighting. A light source above and to the side carves shadow under the jaw. Flat frontal light removes it.
- Weight. Fat under the chin is the single biggest determinant of how defined a jawline looks. Someone who loses fifteen pounds over the same year they start mewing has two explanations available and will credit the interesting one.
- Age. A great many people doing this are teenagers, whose faces are changing on their own over the eighteen months between photos.
- Selection. You are seeing the pairs that worked, chosen from many, by people with a reason to post them.
None of that means every result is fake. It means a photograph cannot tell you which explanation applies, and the explanations that do not involve bone are far more numerous and far more likely.
Where it goes off the rails
Force
The single most common mistake, and the one that causes real damage. A resting posture is where something sits when you are not thinking about it. It is not a press. What gets described online as hard mewing, deliberately pushing the tongue up with sustained force, applies exactly the kind of load that relocates teeth. That is the mechanism behind the bite changes the orthodontic association warns about, and correcting one is orthodontic treatment nobody needed before they started.
Doing it without knowing whether you can
The instruction assumes your nose passes air and your tongue can reach the palate. For a lot of people one or both is untrue, and the advice is then either useless or actively counterproductive.
If your tongue is physically tethered, no amount of intention gets it to the roof of your mouth. That is a finding with its own treatment, and it needs identifying before anyone tells you to just hold it there. If your nose does not pass air, the lips-sealed instruction is asking you to close the only airway that is currently working, which is a different order of problem.
The two years that get spent
This is the harm we would rank highest, and it never shows up in a list of side effects.
Someone with a genuine airway problem, a skeletal discrepancy, or obstructive sleep apnea spends a year or two mewing instead of being assessed. Nothing is injured. Nothing is bruised. The time simply goes, and for a growing child, the window it went through does not reopen.
The frame it is sold in
Mewing is marketed as an appearance technique, which sets the goal in the wrong place and attracts an audience most likely to overdo it. The clinically interesting version of this question is not whether your jawline is sharp. It is whether you can breathe through your nose, whether your tongue rests where it should, and whether your bite is taking loads it was not built for. Those have answers, and they are worth more than a jawline.
Where it fits in what we actually do
We treat jaw and airway problems in three parts, and putting mewing against that frame is the clearest way to place it.
- Release. Bring down muscle tension that is already there. Mewing does none of this, and if you are clenching, the muscle stays overloaded no matter where your tongue sits.
- Retrain. Change the resting pattern. This is the part mewing is attempting, and the target it names is the right one.
- Regulate. Address the breathing and the load underneath it. Mewing does none of this either, and it starts by assuming the nose already works.
So mewing is one third of a plan, self-prescribed, with no exam in front of it. The third it picked is genuinely the right third. What is missing is everything that would tell you whether it applies to you, whether you can even do it, and what else is going on.
Put simply: if mewing appeals to you, what you are actually looking for is myofunctional therapy. Same posture, with an assessment in front of it, a clinician correcting your technique, and the other two thirds attached.
Before you try it, find out whether you can
There is a measurement for this and it takes three minutes.
A wooden depressor is held between the lips, lips only, teeth apart, not biting. Then you breathe normally through your nose while we time it. Three minutes without effort is a clean pass. Most people who struggle do not get past the first ninety seconds.
How it ends is the useful part, because these are four different problems with four different answers. The lips giving out is muscle strength. The seal breaking to breathe points at the nose rather than the lips. The tongue pushing the stick out is a separate finding again. And strain on a pass, chin puckering and lips pressed hard, means a seal held by effort, which will not survive eight hours of sleep.
That is the information mewing skips, and it is the information that decides whether any of it is going to work for you.
What we would actually do
Find out whether the nose works, whether the tongue can reach the palate, and where things sit at rest. In a child, look at how the arch is developing while that is still a question with an open answer. In an adult, be straightforward that the goal is function and comfort rather than a changed facial skeleton.
Then treat the parts that are treatable, in the order that costs least. That usually means getting the nose working, releasing what is tight, and retraining the pattern properly. If the tongue is tethered, that comes first, because nothing else works until it does.
And if the honest answer is that your concern is cosmetic and skeletal, we will say that too, along with what would actually address it. That is a different conversation, and it is a real one, but it is not a tongue exercise.
Worth bringing up
If you have been mewing and something has changed about how your teeth meet, that is worth looking at sooner rather than later. If you are considering it, a short exam will tell you whether the posture is available to you and whether there is a reason it is not.
Call 702-734-0776 or tell us what is going on.
Mewing has not been evaluated in clinical trials, so the statements above describe the absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence for every claim made about it. The developmental role of tongue posture in growing children, and the fusion of the midfacial sutures in adults, are standard orthodontic and anatomical understanding. Myofunctional therapy figures refer to published meta-analyses of sleep apnea outcomes. General education, and not a substitute for an exam.