HeadshotDB Headshot Census · October 2026
Nurse practitioner headshots: what 637 nurse practitioners actually wear and use
In short: A white coat on a plain light grey backdrop is the most common nurse practitioner headshot (34% of professionally taken photos), with a smile showing teeth (75%).
Across 637 nurse practitioner profile photos in health-system and mental-health provider directories, 81% use a plain backdrop and 7% an office. 33% wear a white coat, 23% a blouse or dressy top. 75% smile with their teeth showing, and 10% of the photos are snapshots or selfies rather than professional portraits.
Backdrop
- Plain backdrop81%
- Office7%
- At home6%
- Outdoors, greenery5%
- Other1%
- Outdoors, street0%
- Light grey37%
- Beige18%
- Orange11%
- White9%
- Green8%
- Light blue6%
The most common settings are a plain backdrop (81%) and an office (7%). Where the backdrop is plain, it’s most often light grey, then beige. Each employer has a house style: the health system’s NPs are almost all on light grey, while two of the mental-health groups use their brand colours (orange, green) and a third photographs NPs at home or in an office.
Clothing
- White coat33%
- Blouse or dressy top23%
- Blazer17%
- Collared shirt8%
- Sweater6%
- Plain top or T-shirt4%
- White39%
- Black21%
- Blue9%
- Red or pink8%
- Green6%
- Grey5%
Nurse practitioners most often wear a white coat (33%) or a blouse or dressy top (23%). White leads the colours at 39%. The white coat splits by employer: six in ten health-system NPs wear one, against one in sixteen in mental health, where a blouse or blazer is the norm. Scrubs, the classic nursing outfit, essentially never appear.
What’s worn together
- Plain backdrop · White coat34%
- Plain backdrop · Blouse or dressy top20%
- Plain backdrop · Blazer12%
- Plain backdrop · Collared shirt5%
- Plain backdrop · Sweater4%
- Plain backdrop · Suit3%
Expression and framing
- Smile, teeth showing75%
- Closed-mouth smile19%
- Neutral7%
- Chest up73%
- Head and shoulders22%
- Waist up or wider5%
75% smile with teeth showing. Most photos are framed chest up, and 81% face the camera square on. Three in four smile with their teeth showing, most of all in the health system.
10% are snapshots
Some nurse practitioners 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
It depends where you work. NPs in a health system dress like doctors, mostly in a white coat on light grey: our Doctor & clinician look, built from doctors, matches. Mental-health NPs almost never wear a coat and dress like therapists, in a blouse or blazer: choose our Therapist & coach look (psychiatric NP searches land there).
How we measured
- We read the provider pages of UCHealth (a Colorado health system) and four mental-health groups (LifeStance Health, Thriveworks, Mindpath Health and Talkiatry), read from their sitemaps and kept only where the credential is a nurse practitioner’s (NP, APRN, FNP, PMHNP and so on). Each employer photographs its staff in its own house style, so the health system counts for half the percentages and the four mental-health groups for an eighth each (raw counts: 331 health system, 306 mental health), in October 2026: 637 photos. The directories set the order, so this is a sample of listed nurse practitioners, 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.