HeadshotDB Headshot Census · October 2026
Dentist headshots: what 898 dentists actually wear and use
In short: A white coat on a plain light grey backdrop is the most common dentist headshot (31% of professionally taken photos), with a smile showing teeth (76%).
Across 898 dentist profile photos on dental group websites, 67% use a plain backdrop and 30% an office. 56% wear a white coat, 9% a suit. 76% smile with their teeth showing, and 13% of the photos are snapshots or selfies rather than professional portraits.
Backdrop
- Plain backdrop67%
- Office30%
- Outdoors, greenery1%
- At home1%
- Outdoors, street1%
- Other0%
- Light grey31%
- Light blue23%
- Teal17%
- Beige7%
- Grey7%
- Blue6%
The most common settings are a plain backdrop (67%) and an office (30%). Where the backdrop is plain, it’s most often light grey, then light blue. Dental groups photograph their dentists in a house style: one group’s are almost all on light grey, another’s on its brand teal, another’s in the same beige office. Office settings are three times as common as for doctors.
Clothing
- White coat56%
- Suit9%
- Scrubs9%
- Blazer8%
- Blouse or dressy top7%
- Collared shirt7%
- White63%
- Black13%
- Blue7%
- Navy7%
- Brown or beige3%
- Grey3%
Dentists most often wear a white coat (56%) or a suit (9%). White leads the colours at 63%. More than half wear a white coat, more than doctors do, and one in twelve wears scrubs, which doctors almost never do in a headshot.
What’s worn together
- Plain backdrop · White coat31%
- Office · White coat26%
- Plain backdrop · Suit10%
- Plain backdrop · Blazer9%
- Plain backdrop · Blouse or dressy top7%
- Plain backdrop · Collared shirt6%
Expression and framing
- Smile, teeth showing76%
- Closed-mouth smile20%
- Neutral4%
- Chest up69%
- Head and shoulders20%
- Waist up or wider11%
76% smile with teeth showing. Most photos are framed chest up, and 73% face the camera square on. Dentists smile with their teeth far more than doctors: three in four, against six in ten.
13% are snapshots
Some dentists 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.
Making yours
Our Doctor & clinician look is built from doctors, and the dentist norm is the same picture: a white coat on a plain light backdrop. Choose it with the White coat style, or add the Office backdrop for the practice-photo look three in ten dentists use.
How we measured
- We read the dentist pages of four dental groups, read from their own sitemaps: Aspen Dental (nationwide, every third dentist), Bright Now! and Monarch Dental (Smile Brands, western and southwestern states), Gentle Dental (Massachusetts and New Hampshire) and Mortenson Dental Partners (Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio). Each group photographs its dentists in its own house style, so each group counts equally in the percentages (the raw counts differ: 495, 207, 125 and 71), in October 2026: 898 photos. The directories set the order, so this is a sample of listed dentists, 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.