Why do people have dimples?

Having dimples on your cheeks provide cuteness to your face. It is a small natural depression or indentation of skin on the cheeks or the chin caused due to the flesh below. We can easily recognize dimples on some people’s face when they smile. Dimples are a genetic trait. If one of the parents has dimples then there are 25-50% chances that the child will inherit the gene and if both the parents have dimples then the chances for inheriting the gene is 50-100%. You can easily find someone having dimples in your office, college or neighborhood. In many cultures dimples are considered very attractive.



No doubt dimples make your face cute and attractive but it is a kind of birth defect and it shows that the “malformations” are not always bad. The muscle is shorter in length in the people having dimples on their face whereas the size of muscle is normal in the people who do not have dimples. This is caused because of some fault in the development of subcutaneous connective tissue. Dimples can be on the other parts of body but they are not of much importance as of the face is may be because they are easily visible on the face.

You must have observed that the babies have dimples but they gradually disappears as the child grows up this is because the muscle grows with the age and comes to its normal size which in turn vanishes the dimples. Dimples of your face changes with the time as the muscle develop sor loosen or the fat in your cheek increases or decreases.

There are different types of dimples on the face. Generally people have dimples on both the cheek but in some cases they have only one dimple on a cheek and no dimple on the other one. With this some people may have a dimple on their chin called cleft chin. Dimple on the chin is not hereditary. It occurs due to the incomplete intermingling of the both left and right halves of the lower jaw during embryological development.