Re: Do lips have prints?

Date: Wed Jan 31 10:52:22 2001
Posted By: T. J. Wilkinson, Post-doc/Fellow, General Chemistry and Forensic Science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Area of science: Anatomy
ID: 979610408.An

Message:

This was not as easy of a question as I thought it was. I had never heard of a lip print, but finding some authoritative source to verify yes or no turned out to be very difficult. I did literature searches in Current Content, Biosis, Medline and several other databases that contain scientific and forensic literature. Finally, I consulted The Forensic Science Handbook (By Dr. Richard Saferstein. Prentice Hall, Publisher) and the FBI's Evidence Guide. It appears that the lips do NOT have prints. My guess would be that skin of the lips is of a different texture than the skin of the fingers, palms, feet, etc. The lines that are evident on the lips change with the moisture, etc.

T. J. Wilkinson

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