HeadshotDB Headshot Census · October 2026
Doctor headshots: what 865 doctors actually wear and use
Across 865 doctor profile photos in medical school faculty directories, 85% use a plain backdrop and 10% an office. 46% wear a white coat, 14% a blazer. 61% smile with their teeth showing, and 4% of the photos are snapshots or selfies rather than professional portraits.
Backdrop
- Plain backdrop85%
- Office10%
- Outdoors, street2%
- Outdoors, greenery2%
- Other1%
- At home0%
- Grey19%
- Dark grey17%
- Light grey12%
- Blue10%
- Black8%
- Light blue7%
The most common settings are a plain backdrop (85%) and an office (10%). Where the backdrop is plain, it’s most often grey, then dark grey. Offices and clinics are about one in ten; most academic doctors are photographed on a plain studio backdrop.
Clothing
- White coat46%
- Blazer14%
- Suit13%
- Collared shirt12%
- Blouse or dressy top11%
- Sweater2%
- White51%
- Black13%
- Navy11%
- Blue9%
- Grey7%
- Red or pink3%
Doctors most often wear a white coat (46%) or a blazer (14%). White leads the colours at 51%. The white coat is the signature: nearly half wear one. These are academic doctors, and UAB and LSU make up most of the sample, so doctors in private practice may dress differently.
What’s worn together
- Plain backdrop · White coat38%
- Plain backdrop · Blazer13%
- Plain backdrop · Suit12%
- Plain backdrop · Collared shirt10%
- Plain backdrop · Blouse or dressy top10%
- Office · White coat6%
Our Doctor & clinician look offers the most common of these as styles to choose from, each labelled with how common it is, plus the doctors’ three most common colours.
Expression and framing
- Smile, teeth showing61%
- Closed-mouth smile26%
- Neutral13%
- Chest up71%
- Head and shoulders28%
- Waist up or wider1%
61% smile with teeth showing. Most photos are framed chest up, and 78% face the camera square on.
4% are snapshots
Some doctors use a phone snapshot, a selfie or a photo cropped from somewhere else. On a directory where clients 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 doctor look, from a selfie
We built our Doctor & clinician look from these numbers (white coat, studio grey). Here it is on 4 fictional people, each made from one phone selfie.
Examples are fictional people, not doctors from the study.
How we measured
- We read the faculty pages of clinical departments at five medical schools (LSU Health New Orleans, UAB, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, the Medical College of Wisconsin and SUNY Downstate), keeping photos of one person, in October 2026: 865 photos. Directory order is medical school faculty directories’s, so this is a sample of listed doctors, 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.