5 Signs You Have the Wrong Body Type

I recently came to the realization that I had been wrong about my body type for upwards of nine months. And through that realization, I’ve learned about some of the signs that you have the wrong body type.

By making this post, I hope to offer some clarity to those who also feel like they may have the wrong body type. So here are five signs that you have the wrong body type:

1. You don’t feel good in the lines for your type

The line recommendations are all about harmonizing with your body’s natural lines and augmenting the beauty that you naturally have. So if you don’t feel beautiful or good in the line recommendations for your body type, then that’s a sign that you have a different body type.

If this is the case for you, try playing around with various lines, and see which ones you do feel good in. Then you might be able to ‘reverse engineer’ your body type, by figuring out which body type has those line recommendations.

2. You find yourself making many alterations to your body type’s lines

This is something that I did a lot. For a while I thought I was in the classic family, but I was actually in the gamine family. So whenever I wore classic lines, I always ended up making little alterations.

Most of the time I would end up wearing something with more contrast. If I was feeling bolder I would sometimes mix soft and stiff fabrics, or fitted and loose silhouettes. Wearing purely classic lines didn’t quite look right, so I started making small adjustments, until I wasn’t even wearing classic lines anymore.

If this is the case for you, try to analyze which body type’s lines you’re shifting to. If you have the wrong body type, figuring out what you’re subconsciously drawn to can help you figure out which body type you actually have.

3. You question your features every time you pass by a mirror

Always second-guessing myself was the most tiring thing about having the wrong body type. Every time I saw my reflection in the mirror, I began to question just how balanced or unbalanced my features were, and it became exhausting to have to justify my answers each time I washed my hands at the bathroom sink.

It turns out, there was a reason for this nagging voice in my head. I was wrong about my features, and I subconsciously knew it. But I always pushed that little voice down.

Funny enough, the features that I did correctly type never seemed to come up during that phase of questioning. And now that I’ve found answers that do match with my features, that nagging voice has gone away. Instead of dreading to see my reflection, I can now appreciate what’s staring back at me.

4. Wearing your lines makes certain features stand out or look disproportionate

As I wrote before, I’m in the gamine family, but for awhile I thought I was in the classic family. One of the major indicators that I had the wrong body type was that my features always looked disproportionate whenever I wore classic lines.

Specifically, my arms always looked too long, my nose and cheeks too round, and anytime I put makeup on around my eyes they seemed to double in size (didn’t matter what style of makeup, my eyes looked so round).

Other features seemed slightly disproportionate as well, but those were the features that really stood out to me.

Turns out, it’s because my features weren’t as balanced or moderate as I thought they were. My arms looked super long because my arms are long. My eyes looked super round because my eyes are round. When I finally realized this I went back to the body types test, and redid my answers. It took me a few attempts, but when I settled on the answers that best described my features, it was obvious that I was in the gamine family.

If you find you look disproportionate in your lines, try to figure out where the discrepancies are. It can help you figure out if you’ve answered certain questions on the body types test incorrectly.

5. You prefer the lines of a different body type

I think that a lot of the time we have a subconscious pull to the lines that actually suit us, we just don’t quite realize it. Often, the ‘rules’ about fashion that we’ve been taught get in the way of this subconscious knowledge, so we end up going with what we perceive as the safe option (at least, that was the case for me).

When trying to figure out your Kibbe body type, ignore the ‘rules’ that you’ve learned about clothing and style.

I’m quite small in stature, so I’ve seen a lot of videos and articles recommend that I wear one block of color in my outfits, to make me look taller. But I just look off if I wear only one color in my outfits. If I want to do a monochromatic outfit, I have to do various shades or tones of that one color, or else I end up lost in the outfit.

If you have a strong preference for a different set of lines, try them out and see if they suit you! You might find it that they do.

Lastly, I’m going to recommend that you do the body types test multiple times, and even try different versions of it. Answering the questions can be difficult, and it’s especially hard to be objective with our own bodies, so I find that waiting a couple of days in between attempts at the test can lead to more objective results.

I have a new version of the test in the works, which has new illustrations, different wording (to make the answers more clear), and is formatted a bit differently, so that it works for all genders. Stay tuned for that!