Biological family reference photographs. If the missing child’s parents and siblings can be photographed at the age the child would currently be, those photographs provide concrete reference material for how the child’s genetic lineage expresses itself in adult features. A missing child’s biological parent at thirty is showing the face that carries many of the same underlying genetic characteristics the child would show at thirty. The artist uses these references to calibrate the age-progression toward what is actually likely, rather than what is generically “adult.”
Established developmental knowledge. Forensic artists trained in facial aging understand the typical trajectory of how facial features change — how the nose elongates, how the jaw develops, how fat distribution shifts in adolescence and early adulthood, how hairlines and skin texture evolve. This knowledge helps fill gaps where family reference photographs do not precisely correspond.
Each age-progression takes approximately eight hours. The resulting image is not a prediction in any scientific sense — it is an estimate, produced by a trained specialist, using the best available biological information. NCMEC updates these images every two years until a missing child turns eighteen, then every five years after that.
In Carlina White’s case, the age-progression would have been built using photographs from Joy White, Carl Tyson, and other biological family members who cooperated with NCMEC. The image that Carlina found on the website in late 2010 had been updated multiple times over the preceding two decades. When she looked at it and recognized something of herself — and something of her daughter — she was encountering an image that had been built, in part, from the faces of her biological parents.