Does Mewing really work?
You have seen it on TikTok or YouTube: someone presses their tongue against the roof of their mouth, holds it there, and claims that months later their jawline is sharper and their profile transformed.
The honest answer up front: if you are old enough to read this article, mewing is not going to reshape your face.
But the idea underneath it is not nonsense. It is a repackaged version of something dentistry and speech therapy have understood for decades — and the real version can do a great deal for a growing child. There are effective options for adults too. They are just not the ones going viral.
What is mewing?
Mewing is named after the late British dentist John Mew, who developed a method he called "orthotropics", and his son Mike Mew. Both have since been removed from the UK dental register — worth knowing, given how much of the online enthusiasm rests on their authority.
The technique is simple: rest the tongue flat and wide against the palate — the whole tongue, including the back third — keep the lips sealed, let the teeth rest lightly together, and breathe through the nose.
The key point is that it is meant to be a resting posture, not an exercise. Not ten minutes a day, but all day, until it becomes the default position of your tongue.
What are people hoping to get out of it?
Two quite different sets of hopes:
Appearance. A sharper jawline, higher cheekbones, a more forward midface, less soft tissue under the chin, straighter teeth without braces. In the "looksmaxxing" corners of the internet, mewing is sold as free at-home facial surgery.
Health and function. Easier nasal breathing, less snoring, better sleep, relief from a dry mouth and constant congestion. Some people arrive at mewing while looking for answers about sleep apnoea.
Both are reasonable things to want, and both point at something real: the shape of your jaws genuinely does affect how you look and how well you breathe. The question is whether a tongue posture can deliver it.
left: poor facial development as a consequence of mouth breathing and wrong tongue posture.
right: proper facial development, nasal breathing and tongue resting on the palate.
Mewing already had a name: myofunctional therapy
Here is what the videos leave out. Mewing is just one element of orofacial myofunctional therapy.
Myofunctional therapy is the structured retraining of the muscles of the face, mouth and throat. A course of therapy works on:
Tongue resting posture — up against the palate, not lying low in the floor of the mouth
Nasal breathing — day and night, instead of habitual mouth breathing
Swallowing — without the tongue thrusting forward against the teeth
Lip seal — lips closed at rest, without strain
Chewing — properly, with the back teeth, on both sides
It is delivered by a trained therapist. It starts with an assessment, produces an individual plan over weeks to months, and checks whether the prerequisites for success are even present before it begins.
So — does it work?
Split it into two questions, because the answers differ.
Does the tongue matter for how a face grows? Yes.
Can the tongue change a face that has finished growing? No.
Whole story short: if you are an adult, mewing will not change your bone structure in a significant way. An American Association of Orthodontists article puts it neatly: the evidence for mewing's jawline-sculpting claims is "as thin as dental floss." Facial form comes from genetics, skeletal growth and muscle function interacting over years — not from tongue placement in adulthood.
You might be surprised, but sustained, uneven tongue pressure can move some teeth and not others, opening gaps or tipping teeth out of line. It can alter a bite, and has been linked to jaw joint pain and speech difficulties. If it does cause damage, fixing it takes longer than the original treatment would have.
What actually helps jaws develop
While a face is still growing, function is a genuine input. Four things matter most.
Breastfeeding. Feeding at the breast demands more effortful tongue and jaw work than a bottle. Longer breastfeeding is associated with markedly less posterior crossbite and fewer crowded, narrow upper arches. Caveat: these are observational studies rather than proof.
Hard, fibrous food — actually chewed. Bone is built by load. From animal studies and comparisons across populations and historical periods, there is good reason to think a soft, processed diet gives the growing jaw far less to work against. Raw vegetables, whole fruit, tough bread, meat off the bone: that is training.
Correct tongue resting posture. A tongue sitting up in the palate acts as a gentle internal scaffold, all day long. This is the grain of truth mewing is built on — in a child.
Nasal breathing. Arguably the most important, because it governs the others. A child who breathes through the mouth must keep it open; with the mouth open the tongue drops away from the palate and the lips cannot seal. Over years, that pattern is associated with a narrow upper jaw, a longer face, and a mandible sitting further down and back.
All four are about function — what the mouth is asked to do while it is being built.
The principle: form follows function
Bone is not an inert scaffold. It is living tissue that remodels in response to the forces on it — the principle behind Wolff's law, and the reason astronauts lose bone density and tennis players build it asymmetrically in their playing arm. In the face, the corresponding idea is the "functional matrix" hypothesis: how the soft tissues work influences how the bones grow. A well-supported principle rather than a precisely quantified law, but the direction is clear.
A palate with a tongue resting in it, air moving quietly through the nose, lips sealed and back teeth chewing real food tends to grow wide and forward. A palate with the tongue low, the mouth hanging open and nothing to chew tends to grow narrow and downward.
This is why myofunctional therapy has real potential in children and so little in adults. In a child you are not forcing bone anywhere — you are changing the instructions it is growing to.
But the principle runs both ways, and this is the caveat that gets left out: form also constrains function. If a palate is already too narrow for the tongue to fit into, a child cannot adopt the right posture however motivated they are. If the nasal airway is blocked — adenoids, tonsils, allergy, a deviated septum — they cannot breathe through the nose, and the mouth will be used instead. Every time. Which is why you cannot simply hand out exercises and hope.
left side: narrow palate, no tongue space versus right side: wide palate and sufficient space for the tongue.
How long do jaws grow?
This decides which treatment is possible, so it is worth being precise.
The upper jaw (maxilla) By around age 12, much of the maxilla’s transverse development—and a substantial proportion of its overall size—is present, but length and vertical growth may continue through the teenage years.
The lower jaw (mandible) carries on longer — broadly into the mid-to-late teens in girls and the late teens to early twenties in boys, with wide variation.
So: the window in which jaws can be shaped by function, or moved with simple appliances, is childhood and early adolescence. As long as the jaws are growing, you can influence their shape. Once growth is complete, you can no longer do it by function alone.
That is the honest reason mewing fails adults. Not that the tongue is unimportant — the material stopped being mouldable.
What treatments are there?
Young children, ideally ages 2–6: myofunctional therapy
The best window there is. Establish nasal breathing, a lip seal, the tongue up, proper chewing and a correct swallow and then let growth do the work. Early, non-invasive, working with the biology rather than against it. The earliest part of that window is really habit and airway management (ENT and allergy treatment, weaning off dummy or thumb).
Two prerequisites, both non-negotiable:
The child must be able to breathe through the nose. If the nose is blocked, mouth breathing wins every time. An ENT assessment often comes first.
There must be room on the palate for the tongue. If the upper arch is too narrow, the tongue has nowhere to go.
If either is missing, that gets addressed first.
From around age 4 into the early teens: guiding growth with appliances
Where the palate is too narrow for the tongue, or the nasal airway is compromised by a constricted upper jaw, an expander widens it. Because the suture is still open, this produces real skeletal change rather than just tooth movement. Conventional tooth-borne expanders become progressively less reliable from the early-to-mid teens — which is exactly why the adult techniques below exist.
Appliance and therapy belong together here: the expander creates the space, therapy teaches the tongue to move into it and hold it. Form, then function.
Expander in a 4 year old patient
Adults: orthopaedic expansion with DOMEzero
If you are reading this you are most likely already grown and you would probably like more jaw rather than less. A tongue posture cannot give you that. Skeletal expansion can.
DOME stands for Distraction Osteogenesis Maxillary Expansion; DOMEzero is the version that adds synchronised clear aligners so no gap opens between the front teeth. It solves exactly the problem above: in an adult, the midpalatal suture will not reliably open just because you push on the teeth.
So instead of pushing on the teeth and hoping, the DOMEzero expander is anchored directly into the bone of the palate with mini-implants and activated gradually, in small increments. The bone edges separate, and the body lays down new bone in the space created. (Fun fact: distraction osteogenesis, the same principle used in limb-lengthening surgery).
The "zero" refers to the gap. Conventional adult expansion comes with a wide space between the upper front teeth for months. In DOMEzero, clear aligners run simultaneously, moving the teeth into the new bone as it forms, so that space never opens.
What can change:
A wider palate — real room for the tongue
A wider nasal floor and larger nasal airway — easier nasal breathing, and for many patients better sleep and less snoring
A broader smile arch — a structural change to the upper jaw, not a cosmetic illusion laid over it
DOMEzero illustration: growing jaws in adults
What you should also know. DOMEzero is designed to work without bone cuts wherever possible, and in most adults it does — but sometimes the bone resists separation and a (minimally invasive) surgical release is needed, and that cannot always be predicted from imaging beforehand.
If snoring or daytime tiredness is part of why you are here, that suggests a sleep study and a medical diagnosis. Expansion can improve the airway substantially, and the published evidence is in adults with diagnosed obstructive sleep apnoea. But it is not a stand-alone cure and should not be started on suspicion alone (!!).
Timeline (how we run it; other practices sequence it differently). Active expansion typically takes 4–8 months, deliberately slow because aligner movement is synchronised with it. The appliance then stays a further 9–12 months while the new bone mineralises. Including bite finishing, total treatment averages around two years. A real orthopaedic treatment, not a quick fix, but it changes the skeleton, which nothing else here can do in an adult.
DOMEzero effects on nasal cavity (wider nasal floor) and smile (wider smile).
And then function has to follow
With DOMEzero we create proper form. Now we want function to follow it.
Which is why I strongly recommend that adult expansion patients also work with a myofunctional therapist. Therapy retrains the resting posture, establishes nasal breathing and a lip seal, and corrects the swallow. That retraining is what supports the stability of the result rather than letting it drift back.
The whole argument of this article in two sentences: in a child, function shapes form. In an adult, we create the form — and function is what holds it.
In early years the tongue shapes the palate.
So, does mewing really work?
As a viral shortcut to a jawline: no. If your face has finished growing, no amount of tongue pressure will change your bones, and doing it unsupervised risks moving your teeth in ways you did not intend.
As a rediscovery of something true about how faces grow: absolutely. Tongue posture, nasal breathing and proper chewing matter enormously — during growth. Mewing's mistake is not the idea. It is the timing.
If you are an adult who recognises yourself in this : a narrow palate, crowded teeth, no room for your tongue, a nose that never feels clear, snoring, waking up tired — the useful next step is not another tongue exercise. It is finding out whether your upper jaw can still be expanded, and what that would involve for you.
That is what a consultation is for. We look at your airway, palate, bite and imaging, and give you a straight answer about whether DOMEzero is right for you — including what it cannot change, and whether something else would serve you better.
significantly wider smile after DOMEzero treatment
Further reading
American Association of Orthodontists — What is Mewing, and Does it Work? — https://aaoinfo.org/whats-trending/is-mewing-bad-for-you/
Angelieri F. et al. — Midpalatal suture maturation: classification method for individual assessment before rapid maxillary expansion, Am J Orthod Dentofacial Orthop — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24182592/
Midpalatal suture maturation in adults aged 16–50: a CBCT study, BMC Oral Health 2025 — https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12903-025-06883-6
Efficacy of miniscrew-assisted rapid palatal expansion (MARPE) in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Eur J Orthod 2021 — https://academic.oup.com/ejo/article/43/3/313/6244623
Breastfeeding duration and malocclusions: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Sci Rep 2017 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05393-y
Liu S.Y. et al. — Distraction osteogenesis maxillary expansion (DOME) for adult obstructive sleep apnea patients with narrow maxilla and nasal floor — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28675100/
DOMEzero — What is DOMEzero? — https://getdomezero.com/what-is-dome-zero/