HeadshotDB Headshot Census · October 2026
Nurse educator headshots: what 372 nursing faculty actually wear and use
Across 372 nurse educator profile photos in nursing school faculty directories, 65% use a plain backdrop and 21% an office. 56% wear business casual and 40% a suit or blazer. 77% smile with their teeth showing, and 4% of the photos are snapshots or selfies rather than professional portraits.
Backdrop
- Plain backdrop65%
- Office21%
- Outdoors, street6%
- Outdoors, greenery5%
- At home1%
- Other1%
- White25%
- Light grey23%
- Grey20%
- Beige7%
- Brown7%
- Dark grey5%
The most common settings are a plain backdrop (65%) and an office (21%). Where the backdrop is plain, it’s most often white, then light grey.
Clothing
- Blazer36%
- Blouse or dressy top28%
- Cardigan8%
- Suit7%
- Sweater7%
- Collared shirt6%
- Black24%
- Navy13%
- Blue12%
- Grey11%
- White11%
- Green10%
Nursing faculty most often wear a blazer (36%) or a blouse or dressy top (28%). Black leads the colours at 24%. Scrubs are almost absent: these are nurse educators and researchers, who dress like other academics.
What’s worn together
- Plain backdrop · Blazer21%
- Plain backdrop · Blouse or dressy top18%
- Office · Blazer11%
- Plain backdrop · White coat6%
- Plain backdrop · Cardigan6%
- Plain backdrop · Sweater5%
Expression and framing
- Smile, teeth showing77%
- Closed-mouth smile19%
- Neutral5%
- Chest up94%
- Head and shoulders4%
- Waist up or wider2%
77% smile with teeth showing. Most photos are framed chest up, and 76% face the camera square on. Nursing faculty smile with teeth more often than the doctors, lawyers, therapists or realtors we’ve measured.
4% are snapshots
Some nursing faculty 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.
Making yours
These are faculty, not bedside nurses, so our Nursing & care look isn’t built from them. For a teaching or research profile, the Business casual look (a blazer on a plain backdrop) matches what most of them wear.
How we measured
- We read the faculty directories of six nursing schools (UAB, Loyola Chicago, UT Chattanooga, Missouri, SUNY Downstate and Toledo) in October 2026: 372 photos. Directory order is nursing school faculty directories’s, so this is a sample of listed nursing faculty, 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.