In Your Face: Genes, Expressions, and Identity

Richard Jonathan O. Taduran, Ph.D.  |  21 August 2025

At a wake I attended recently, I overheard relatives telling a daughter she looked exactly like her late mother—pinagbiyak na bunga. The phrase, so deeply Filipino, frames resemblance as fate: halves of the same fruit, split but still bound together. It was meant tenderly, but to me it stirred an old forensic question: how much of who we are is really written on the face?

When you look in the mirror, you don’t just see features. You see the echoes of your parents, the traces of ancestry, and the lines of emotion carved across a lifetime. In forensic science, which has long concerned itself with bones, DNA, and identity, the face has become the most visible—but also the most misunderstood—marker of who we are. What does it truly reveal, and what is illusion?

DNA and the Face

Science fiction has long imagined machines that could reconstruct a person’s face from a drop of blood. Today, forensic DNA phenotyping makes a limited version of that dream real. Companies like Parabon Snapshot can predict traits such as eye color, skin tone, and hair type from DNA samples. Studies also point to specific genes that influence nose width, lip thickness, or cheekbone height. But the picture that emerges is never more than probabilistic—a sketch, not a portrait.

Even identical twins, who share almost the same DNA, are not perfectly alike. Small differences in how their genes are expressed, combined with environment, nutrition, and life’s random etchings, make them distinguishable.

And then there are doppelgängers—people who look eerily alike but share no kinship. A 2022 Cell Reports study led by José Cordero found that while unrelated lookalikes may share some genetic variants tied to facial morphology, their DNA is not the same. They are products of probability. In a world of eight billion, some faces will inevitably resemble others. The forensic lesson is humbling: DNA writes possibilities, not certainties.

Your Family and Your Face

As a forensic anthropologist, I have examined craniofacial traits in human identification cases—features such as the nasal aperture, orbital form, or jaw angle. These reflect both evolutionary history and inherited variation, helping narrow ancestry in forensic contexts.

This is also why family resemblance is so striking. Children inherit mosaics of genetic instructions, producing echoes of faces across generations. A family photograph often feels like a hall of mirrors: the same cheekbones, the same eyes, the same smile appearing in refrain.

But ancestry estimation has a complicated history. In the late 1700s, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proposed and ranked five “races” based on skull measurements. His categories were later misused to justify pseudo-scientific typologies and hierarchies. That legacy haunts forensic anthropology to this day, with many calling for decolonization or outright abandonment of ancestry estimation. Modern practice stresses probabilities, not absolutes. Faces can suggest origins, but they cannot define them.

Emotions and Faces

The face is not just structure—it is performance. Beneath the skin, muscles orchestrate expressions that signal emotions before words form. Sometimes these are deliberate, as when we pose for a smile. At other times they are involuntary: microexpressions that flicker for a fraction of a second, revealing feelings we might want to hide.

In 2012, I published Mukha Mo: A Preliminary Study on Filipino Facial Expressions, the first and still the only systematic study of Filipino facial expressions. My findings confirmed both universal and culture-specific patterns. Happiness was the most universally recognized emotion. But fear was another story—participants often struggled to identify it, confusing it with surprise. More strikingly, sadness itself carried a secondary association with fear, a pairing that may be unique to Filipinos.

These results hint that our cultural lens shapes how we read the face. A smile here can mean more than joy; it might signal courtesy, or maybe hiya (embarrassment). Yet what is taught in criminology, psychology, and forensic settings are largely Western standards of expression. This mismatch risks errors: an investigator may mistake a nervous Filipino smile for deceit, or miss the way fear and sadness blur together.

Thirteen years later, no follow-up studies have been done. The silence speaks volumes: while Western emotion research thrives—and colleagues in Glasgow are already applying facial expression data in robotics and AI to produce human-like expressions—Filipino facial expressions remain largely uncharted.

Face and Personality

Can personality be read in a face? Folk wisdom insists it can. In the Philippines, we say “mukhang kontrabida” of someone with the sharp, brooding features of a Paquito Diaz—villainous before a word is spoken. Families tease “Kanino pa ba magmamana ’yan?” when children inherit not just looks but temperament from their parents. And in everyday banter, parents claim the “good” traits as their own legacy, while the “bad” ones must surely come from the in-laws.

Science, however, is cautious. Studies show only weak links between facial features and personality traits. Yet the beliefs persist. Our language is full of shorthand judgments: mukhang mabait (looks kind), mukhang mapagkakatiwalaan (looks trustworthy), even mukhang mabango (looks fragrant). At its darker edge, people also say mukhang kriminal (looks like a criminal) or mukhang adik (looks like a drug addict). These labels may sound casual, even playful, but they reveal how quickly we project character onto appearance—and how easily bias creeps in. This echoes the long-discredited “science” of physiognomy, which once claimed personality could be read in facial features, a pseudoscience that fueled prejudice and discrimination.

That danger lingers today. Snap judgments about “criminal-looking” faces can feed into wrongful arrests, discriminatory policing, or even forensic missteps when investigators lean too heavily on appearance instead of evidence. Faces become screens for our stories, shaping not only how people are treated but how they come to see themselves. Forensic science reminds us that such judgments, while culturally ingrained, carry real-world weight.

Every Face Tells a Story

In forensic science, the face lies at the intersection of biology and culture. DNA can sketch outlines but cannot render portraits. Ancestry gives context but never certainty. Emotions animate our faces, but their meanings differ across societies. Personality is not inscribed in bone, but our beliefs insist otherwise.

The face, then, is a layered text. Genes provide structure, ancestry echoes history, emotions reveal inner life, and society interprets them all through its own lens.

To study the face is to navigate probability and perception, inheritance and imagination. And to see a face—your own, your parent’s, or a stranger’s—is to glimpse not just appearance, but a biography written in flesh, bone, and expression, waiting to be read.