These images provided us, after some manipulation, with a definition of each face as 30,000 points on the surface of the face, effectively a 3-dimensional map of the face. Nose and ethnicity. The following are some of the categories of the ethnic nose: Hispanics. Mediterranean ethnic groups span those with heritages ranging from Persian to Greek to Italian to Arab to Jewish, to name a few. This is a way of pulling out of the data the features that are most variable. The extent to which the points are further apart for the non-identical twins than for the identical twins is a measure of the genetic influences on this point, which geneticists call the heritability. The recognition of individual faces is only possible because the human face is so hugely variable. However, a good rhinoplasty will change certain aspects of the ethnic nose without changing it entirely.
The nose is a facial feature with characteristics that can sometimes be attributed to a particular race or ethnic culture. The facial features included the well-known "Roman" nose, which may have been partly derived from an Etruscan source. We have DNA based genetic information on about 500,000 variants for each of about 1500 individuals from our PoBI volunteers for whom we have images and for a similar number of the TwinsUK volunteers with images. The nose is a facial feature with characteristics that can sometimes be attributed to a particular race or ethnic culture. Each of these three variants hasThe first of these variants, found in a gene called Figure 2: PC2 profile: Average faces, using the original variables, for 14 East Asian females (A) and the upper 10% (more East Asian) (B) and lower 10% (more European) (C) extremes of the PoBI females.Each of the three genetic variants that we have been able to associate with a specific facial feature increases the chance of having the specific feature byFigure 3: PC7 profile: Average profiles of female faces, using the original variables, for the upper variant associated 10% (A) and lower 10% (C) extremes and the overall average (B).Figure 4: PC1 eyes: Average eye phenotypes, using the original variables, for the upper 10% (A), the lower 10% (C) extremes, and the overall average (B).Our success in finding these genetic variants depends largely on our ability to identify facial features that have a high heritability based on the twin data, and on the choice of extremes for studying the genetic variant associations. While some have ascribed the aquiline nose to specific ethnic, racial, or geographic groups, and in some cases associated it with other supposed non-physical characteristics (e.g., intelligence, status, personality, etc., see below), no scientific studies or ev… Most ethnic groups have a specific set of characteristics of the nose that sets it apart from others. This procedure is rather like that used by Francis Galton, a pioneer of studies of faces and of twins, nearly 150 years ago, but now we have sophisticated computer tools and high technology cameras that improve enormously the extent to which we can overlay all the images with each other.We have used volunteers from three sources: a) 1832 unique volunteers from our very well characterised People of the British Isles (PoBI) study, b) 1567 unique twins from the TwinsUK cohort, about equal numbers of identical and non-identical twins, and c) 33 images of East Asians, mainly Chinese.Having the facial images of the twins enabled our next important step in the analysis, namely to identify the facial features that are likely to have high heritability. It seems likely that many more specific and relatively large genetic variant effects on human facial features will be found in the future using approaches such as we have described. We cannot recognize a person just by their height or by any single quantitative facial feature, such as the distance between the eyes or the height to width ratio of the face. The extreme facial likeness of identical twins, who inherit the same versions of each gene from each of their parents, and so have identical genotypes, shows that the various facial features by which we recognise people are inherited.