Morphological study of the labial grooves’ pattern in an Italian population

Cheiloscopy is the branch of forensic dentistry studying the patterns and the systems of the lips’ grooves for identification purposes. Different authors have studied different ethnic population but no research has been carried out specific to the Italian population. This study aimed to describe the pattern and the system of lip grooves in an Italian population composed of 96 subjects. The lip prints were taken as follows: a thin film of lipstick was applied onto cleaned and dried inferior and superior lips. The impressions of the lips were taken using a transparent adhesive tape. The grooves were identified and classified according to the classification of Suzuki and Tsuchihashi and a pattern was assigned. Sixty-eight different patterns were detected in the superior lips and 53 different patterns in the inferior lips. The most frequent pattern was the III-IV-IV-III and II-I-I-II for superior and inferior lips respectively. Within the limit of the sample size, the morphological analysis of the lip-prints confirmed their potential uniqueness in an Italian population.