HeadshotDB Headshot Census · October 2026
Author headshots: what 1,333 authors actually wear and use
In short: A blazer on a plain light grey or black backdrop is the most common author headshot (13% of professionally taken photos), most often in black, and no usual expression: 35% smile with teeth, 35% smile without, 31% look neutral.
Across 1,333 author profile photos on Penguin Random House author pages, 44% use a plain backdrop and 21% an outdoor setting with greenery. 55% wear business casual and 21% a suit or blazer. 35% smile with their teeth showing, and 19% of the photos are snapshots or selfies rather than professional portraits.
Backdrop
- Plain backdrop44%
- Outdoors, greenery21%
- At home16%
- Outdoors, street10%
- Office4%
- Other4%
- Light grey16%
- Black16%
- Grey13%
- Dark grey12%
- White11%
- Brown7%
The most common settings are a plain backdrop (44%) and an outdoor setting with greenery (21%). Where the backdrop is plain, it’s most often light grey, then black. Where the backdrop is plain, black and dark grey together (27%) outnumber light grey (16%). And one in six author photos is black and white, against under 3% in every other profession we’ve measured.
Clothing
- Blazer23%
- Collared shirt20%
- Blouse or dressy top18%
- Plain top or T-shirt12%
- Sweater11%
- Suit6%
- Black37%
- Blue14%
- White11%
- Grey8%
- Brown or beige8%
- Navy7%
Authors most often wear a blazer (23%) or a collared shirt (20%). Black leads the colours at 37%. Authors dress down from the other professions: most wear business casual, and more than one in five wear casual clothes, often a plain top or sweater.
What’s worn together
- Plain backdrop · Blazer13%
- Plain backdrop · Blouse or dressy top9%
- Plain backdrop · Collared shirt9%
- Plain backdrop · Sweater6%
- Plain backdrop · Plain top or T-shirt6%
- Plain backdrop · Suit5%
Our Creative look offers the most common of these as styles to choose from, each labelled with how common it is, plus the authors’ three most common colours.
Expression and framing
- Smile, teeth showing35%
- Closed-mouth smile35%
- Neutral31%
- Chest up48%
- Waist up or wider36%
- Head and shoulders16%
35% smile with teeth showing. Most photos are framed chest up, and 38% face the camera square on. Authors are the only profession we’ve measured where a toothy smile isn’t the norm: expressions split almost evenly between a smile with teeth, a closed-mouth smile and a neutral face. They’re also framed wider, often waist up, and turned at an angle more often than square to the camera.
19% are snapshots
Some authors use a phone snapshot, a selfie or a photo cropped from somewhere else. On a directory where people compare a page of faces side by side, a well-lit portrait is one of the few ways to stand out before anyone reads a word.
The author look, from a selfie
We built our Creative look from these numbers (blazer or shirt, dark or light backdrop). Here it is on 4 fictional people, each made from one phone selfie.
Examples are fictional people, not authors from the study.
How we measured
- We read Penguin Random House’s author pages: every fourth of its 99 author sitemaps, a fixed 40% of the contributors in each (about 10,000), keeping the ones with a photo of one person, in October 2026: 1,333 photos. The directories set the order, so this is a sample of listed authors, not a random one.
- Each photo was labelled by an AI vision model for presentation only: setting, clothing, colour, expression, framing, pose and whether it looks professionally taken. Backdrop colour was measured from the pixels. The model was told not to infer gender, race, age or identity, and had no field to record them. Labels weren’t checked by hand, so treat small differences with caution.
- We kept only the totals on this page. Names were dropped when the listings were read, and no photo, link or face data was stored.