The temple is the flat, slightly indented area on each side of your head, between your eye and your ear. If you place your fingertips just past the outer edge of your eyebrow and clench your jaw, you’ll feel a muscle flex beneath the skin. That’s your temple, and it sits over one of the thinnest, most vulnerable parts of the entire skull.
Where Exactly the Temple Is
The temple spans the region from the outer corner of the eyebrow backward toward the top of the ear. Its upper boundary blends into the side of the forehead, and its lower edge merges with the cheekbone. The skin here is noticeably thinner than on the forehead or the back of the head, and on many people you can see veins or even a slight pulse beneath the surface.
Underneath the skin lies a broad, fan-shaped muscle called the temporalis. This is one of the main muscles you use to chew. It pulls your lower jaw upward and backward, handling the powerful motions of biting and grinding food. You can feel it tighten every time you clench your teeth, which is why the temple is often a hotspot for jaw-related tension and soreness.
Why the Skull Is Thinner Here
The bone beneath the temple averages about 4.7 millimeters thick. That’s nearly half the thickness of the frontal bone (about 8 mm) or the bone at the back of the skull (also about 8 mm). In some individuals, the temporal bone can be as thin as 2.3 mm.
This thinness exists because four separate skull bones meet at a junction called the pterion, located roughly two finger-widths above the outer corner of the eye socket. The frontal bone, parietal bone, temporal bone, and sphenoid bone all converge here in an H-shaped seam. Because this junction is a meeting point of multiple bones rather than a solid, continuous plate, it lacks the structural reinforcement found elsewhere on the skull.
Why the Temple Is Vulnerable to Injury
Running just beneath the pterion is a major blood vessel called the middle meningeal artery, which supplies blood to the protective membranes surrounding the brain. A hard blow to the temple can fracture the thin bone and tear this artery. When that happens, blood pools between the skull and the brain’s outer membrane, creating pressure that compresses the brain. This is called an epidural hematoma, and it’s a life-threatening emergency that requires immediate surgical treatment.
About 85% of middle meningeal artery injuries result in this type of bleeding. One characteristic pattern is a “lucid interval,” where a person seems fine after the initial impact but deteriorates rapidly as blood accumulates. This is the reason a temple strike is considered one of the most dangerous impacts to the head, and why even seemingly minor blows to this area should be taken seriously.
Why Your Temples Hurt During Headaches
Temple pain is one of the most common headache complaints. Tension headaches, the most prevalent type, typically produce a dull, pressing sensation across the forehead and on both sides of the head. Stress is the most frequently reported trigger. Researchers once believed this pain came directly from the temporalis muscle contracting under stress, but current evidence suggests the pain system itself becomes sensitized, making the muscles feel tender even without significant contraction.
Migraines, by contrast, often produce throbbing pain concentrated on one temple. The temporal artery, which you can sometimes feel pulsing at the temple, runs through this region and can become involved in the inflammatory process that drives migraine pain.
Conditions That Affect the Temple
In adults over 50, persistent temple pain with scalp tenderness can signal a condition called giant cell arteritis (also known as temporal arteritis). This is inflammation of the arteries running through the temple area. The affected artery often feels hard and cord-like to the touch, with a weakened pulse. Left untreated, it can lead to permanent vision loss. Diagnosis typically involves blood tests to check for inflammation and, in many cases, a small biopsy of the temporal artery.
Important branches of the facial nerve also pass through the temple region. These nerves control your ability to raise your eyebrows and close your eyes. Surgeons operating near the temple or parotid gland (the large salivary gland near the ear) must carefully identify and preserve these nerve branches to avoid affecting facial movement.
Why It’s Called a “Temple”
The word has nothing to do with places of worship. It entered English in the early 1300s from the Old French “temple,” meaning the side of the forehead, which traces back to the Latin “tempora.” The Latin root likely comes from a word meaning “to stretch,” referring to the thin, stretched skin in this area. Old English had a similar idea: the word for temple was “ðunwange,” which translates literally to “thin cheek.” Old Norse and Old High German used nearly identical terms. Across multiple languages, people independently noticed the same thing: the skin and bone here are noticeably thinner than anywhere else on the head.
A more colorful (though less accepted) theory connects the word to “tempus,” meaning time, since the hair at the temples is often the first to turn gray, visibly marking the passage of years.
The Temple as a Pressure Point
In traditional Chinese medicine, the temple corresponds to an acupuncture point called Taiyang, meaning “Supreme Yang.” It sits in the soft depression about one finger-width behind the midpoint between the outer eyebrow and the outer corner of the eye. Practitioners use this point primarily for headaches, eye-related discomfort, and facial pain. Whether or not you practice acupuncture, many people find that gentle circular pressure on the temples provides temporary relief during a tension headache, likely by stimulating blood flow and relaxing the temporalis muscle beneath.