Short Report Body Fat and Facial Shape Are Correlated in Female Adolescents SONJA WINDHAGER, 1 KARIN PATOCKA, 2 AND KATRIN SCHAEFER 2* 1 Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria 2 Department of Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria Objectives: Relative body weight is not only an important indicator for health and reproductive condition, but also subject to stereotypes and stigmatization. It can be reliably assessed from adult faces alone, yet the facial correlates, especially in adolescents, remain largely unidentified. This study was designed to determine the facial features of ado- lescent girls that change with body fat proportion using a modern, comprehensive technique for shape analysis. Methods: Standardized frontal facial photographs of 22 Caucasian female adolescents (mean age 15.8 6 2.7 years) were taken, and body height, body weight, and body fat proportion measured. Seventy-two somatometric measurement points were digitized on each photograph and their Cartesian coordinates regressed onto body fat proportion. Geomet- ric morphometrics also enabled visualizing the statistical results as shapes. Results: Body fat proportion explained 8.7% of the facial shape variation (10,000 permutations, P 5 0.047). Girls with high body fat had a relatively rounder and larger lower face, relatively smaller eyes, and a shorter and wider nose, fuller lips and downturned corners of the mouth. Low body fat was associated with a more angular lower face and a pointier chin, relatively larger eyes and a longer nose. The lips were wider and thinner, the corners of the mouth upturned. Conclusion: Body fat proportion is a substantial factor in facial shape variation of female adolescents. The potential influence of the corresponding facial features on social perception is discussed. Prospects for future research including novel possibilities for stimuli design (GM morphs) are highlighted. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 25:847–850, 2013. V C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Although the quantitative literature on adiposity and obesity is huge, that dealing with under- or overweight associated with facial shape changes is not. This holds especially true for children and juveniles. Our study iden- tifies the facial morphological correlates of body fat in female adolescents. On one hand, by buffering famine, malnutrition, and fluctuations in dietary energy supply, the fat content of adipose tissue plays an important role in enhancing repro- ductive fitness, including trans generational transfers of energy. Accordingly, it might be subject to sexual selec- tion. On the other hand, the direction of selection varies with ecological conditions (Tov ee et al., 2006): in places of constant nutritional oversupply, persons with high levels of body fat are confronted with negative attitudes and stereotypes, and suffer from low self-esteem (e.g., Puhl and Latner, 2007). For adult faces, Coetzee et al. (2009) confirmed the pres- ence of facial cues to body weight, in so far as people quite adequately judged under-, normal- and overweight from frontal photographs of the face alone. Tinlin et al. (2013) replicated this finding in American women. There now is cross-cultural evidence that the cheeks and relative jaw width are the most affected by nutritional condition in terms of adult facial tissue depth (Wilkinson, 2004 for a review; Coetzee et al., 2010 in Caucasian and African faces, Lee et al., 2012 in Korean faces). The literature on adolescents is scarcer. Ferrario et al. (2004), however, identified larger transverse distances (facial widths) at Tragion (proxy for cheek area) and Gonion (lower face) as well as greater anteriorposterior distances (facial depths) in the lower face with increasing body mass index (BMI) in Italian girls. Earlier studies were limited by a morpho- metric approach based on distances, angles, or ratios. Geometric morphometrics, instead, is based on the Cartesian coordinates of the measurement points allow- ing the preservation of the relative spatial arrangements throughout the analysis, and thus enables more powerful statistics and visualization techniques (see the recent Hystrix special issue on geometric morphometrics for details, Vol. 24, June 2013). The current study investigates the association of body fat and facial shape in female adolescents using geometric morphometrics. Although BMI is an accurate estimate for body fat mass among obese adolescents, BMI differences among thinner children can be largely due to fat-free mass (Freedman et al., 2005) because BMI does not distin- guish between body fat and muscle mass which weighs more than fat. As in adults, cheek and jaw prominence are expected to increase with body fat adding to a rounder face outline (e.g., Windhager et al., 2011). Predicted local feature differences include the relative decrease of the eye region (e.g., Lee et al., 2012) and a smaller mouth (both found for adult men, Windhager et al., 2011). METHOD Participants The final dataset comprised 22 Austrian female adoles- cents with a mean age of 15.8 6 2.7 years (range: 10–20 years). Their body fat ranged from 10.6 to 44.8%. Based on the criteria of McCarthy et al. (2006), 5 adolescents Contract grant sponsor: Writing up-Fellowship of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. *Correspondence to: Katrin Schaefer. E-mail: katrin.schaefer@univie.ac.at Received 23 May 2013; Revision received 24 July 2013; Accepted 2 August 2013 DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.22444 Published online 19 September 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). V C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY 25:847–850 (2013)