HeadshotDB Headshot Census · October 2026
Professor headshots: what 2,456 professors actually wear and use
Across 2,456 professor profile photos in university faculty directories, 40% use a plain backdrop and 26% an outdoor setting with greenery. 53% wear business casual and 31% a suit or blazer. 52% smile with their teeth showing, and 29% of the photos are snapshots or selfies rather than professional portraits.
Backdrop
- Plain backdrop40%
- Outdoors, greenery26%
- Office16%
- Outdoors, street8%
- At home7%
- Other3%
- Grey18%
- Light grey17%
- Dark grey16%
- Black10%
- Brown9%
- Beige7%
The most common settings are a plain backdrop (40%) and an outdoor setting with greenery (26%). Where the backdrop is plain, it’s most often grey, then light grey. After the plain backdrop, the next choice is outdoors among trees, usually on campus: one in four, well ahead of offices. Libraries and bookshelves, the classic academic cliché, are rare.
Clothing
- Collared shirt27%
- Blazer23%
- Blouse or dressy top14%
- Suit12%
- Sweater8%
- Plain top or T-shirt7%
- Black27%
- Blue17%
- Grey12%
- Navy11%
- Brown or beige8%
- White8%
Professors most often wear a collared shirt (27%) or a blazer (23%). Black leads the colours at 27%. Collared shirts and blazers lead, and cardigans barely appear. It depends on the field: about half of business and engineering faculty wear a suit or blazer, against under one in four in the sciences and humanities, where one in five dress casually. These are university faculty; K-12 teachers weren’t measured and may dress differently.
What’s worn together
- Plain backdrop · Blazer12%
- Plain backdrop · Collared shirt12%
- Plain backdrop · Suit10%
- Plain backdrop · Blouse or dressy top7%
- Outdoors, greenery · Blazer6%
- Outdoors, greenery · Collared shirt6%
Our Teacher & academic look offers the most common of these as styles to choose from, each labelled with how common it is, plus the professors’ three most common colours.
Expression and framing
- Smile, teeth showing52%
- Closed-mouth smile30%
- Neutral18%
- Chest up65%
- Head and shoulders24%
- Waist up or wider11%
52% smile with teeth showing. Most photos are framed chest up, and 73% face the camera square on. Social science and business faculty smile with teeth more often than scientists and engineers.
29% are snapshots
Some professors 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 professor look, from a selfie
We built our Teacher & academic look from these numbers (blazer or collared shirt, studio grey). Here it is on 4 fictional people, each made from one phone selfie.
Examples are fictional people, not professors from the study.
How we measured
- We read the faculty directories of departments across six fields (humanities and arts, social sciences, sciences and math, business, engineering and computing, and education) at eight universities (UAB, UT Chattanooga, North Florida, Oregon State, Vermont, Ohio, Kansas State and Texas Tech), keeping photos of one person, in October 2026: 2,456 photos. The directories set the order, so this is a sample of listed professors, 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.