Skin texture
Local texture (pore / fine-line proxy)
How much the lightness of the skin varies from one small patch to the next across the cheeks, taken as the mean of the local standard deviation.
Also searched as pores, fine lines and rough skin texture.
How to read it
lightness changes little from one small patch to the next: a smooth-reading surface in this photograph.
a moderate amount of patch-to-patch variation in lightness.
lightness changes sharply from one small patch to the next: more visible texture.
Dominated by lighting geometry: grazing side-light exaggerates texture, flat front flash erases it. Clinical systems (VISIA, Antera) solve this with enclosed calibrated illumination, which a phone cannot. Compare only under matched lighting.
Why every value has an error bar
Every value Canthion reports carries a 1σ uncertainty propagated from MediaPipe Face Mesh's published accuracy (3.96% of inter-ocular distance mean absolute error per landmark, Kartynnik 2019). On a typical photo with 300 px between the pupils, that is about 12 px of wander on every point. Small ratios and angles inherit it, so their intervals are wide. A number without an interval is a number pretending to be more precise than it is.
Common questions
What is skin texture?
How much the lightness of the skin varies from one small patch to the next across the cheeks, taken as the mean of the local standard deviation. Higher = more visible texture.
How is skin texture measured from a photo?
From the pixels of the photograph, not from landmarks: the region (cheeks) is converted to CIE L*a*b* and the value is read as a statistic of those pixels. Because it depends on lighting, it is reported relative to the rest of the same photograph and marked lighting-dependent.
How reliable is skin texture from a photograph?
Dominated by lighting geometry: grazing side-light exaggerates texture, flat front flash erases it. Clinical systems (VISIA, Antera) solve this with enclosed calibrated illumination, which a phone cannot. Compare only under matched lighting.
Related measurements
The rest of the skin set, then the nearest measurements elsewhere on the face. Every one is computed on the same photograph, in the same run, with its own error bar.
Also: how bone-level measurements are taken from a photo · methodology · glossary · all 35 insight pages