[The thickness of the soft tissue of the face for person identification]

A skull may give important information about race, sex, facial details and contribute, even without dental study, to personal identification in case of skeletal remains of unknown origin. It was shown by some authors that upon the cranial framework we may build bit by bit all soft tissues until details of physiognomy take shape and a reasonable reproduction of a living human head emerges. This work is based on the careful measurement of the tissue thickness of several cadavers' head and face in some chosen sites, to obtain mean values, which are the starting point for the restoration of physiognomy details. Collected data calculation gave four simple tables, with thickness mean values in millimetres. These tables successively determine groups according to age, sex and body condition.