The Band Codex Atlas & reference for injectors
Sources and method

Every number has a source.

This page is the audit trail. The anatomy is derived from open reference data under its licence, the surface is registered by a stated method, every landmark measurement in the atlas cites the study it came from, and every doctrine statement is quoted from the locked Band Codex documents at their stated version. Where the site withholds something on purpose, it says so.

The altitude rule

The architecture is public. The coordinates are not.

This site teaches one level above the Codex's working manual. It shows the anatomy, what is read and why, the plane register of each step, the archetypes, the restraint doctrine, the stops and the safety anatomy. It withholds entry points, landmark constructions, volumes and tiers by number, instruments by size, product class by point, and the routing table that maps each read to each point. Those are the Masterclass, taught in person at the chair.

Compliance register

Educational material for medical professionals; not clinical instruction, and not a substitute for the injecting practitioner's own training in vascular anatomy and complication management. No outcome is guaranteed. Before and after photographs are unretouched and shown with consent; results vary. No prescription-only medicine is named or promoted. Prices quoted for the Masterclass are those published on the clinic's own site at the time of writing.

Anatomy data

Real bone, under licence.

BodyParts3D 4.0

The Database Center for Life Science, Japan. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. An adult male reference anatomy (the TARO model) refined against anatomical illustration. Publication: Mitsuhashi N. et al. (2009), BodyParts3D: 3D structure database for anatomical concepts, Nucleic Acids Research 37, D782, doi 10.1093/nar/gkn613.

Used here: the skull (frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, sphenoid, ethmoid, nasal, lacrimal, palatine, zygomatic bones, maxillae, mandible, vomer, inferior conchae), the permanent dentition and gingiva, the nasal cartilages, the eyes and tarsal plates, the external ear, the hair of the head, and the supraorbital, supratrochlear and infratrochlear nerves. Obtained through the re-packaged release of the human-atlas project (binary chunks and manifest), whose adaptations are: axes converted to metres, Y-up; geometry simplified with a 0.2 per cent relative error bound per structure; normals quantised. Attribution as required by the licence; the site is not endorsed by the licensor.

MediaPipe canonical face model

Google, Apache License 2.0. A generic 468-vertex face surface with its standard contour index sets (face oval, eyes, brows, nose, lips). Used here as the soft-tissue reference envelope only, after registration to the BodyParts3D skull as described below. It is not a scan of any individual and does not represent Dr Band's patients.

What the surface is not

A registered generic surface cannot show variation, ethnicity, age or the soft-tissue thickness of a particular man. The atlas labels it as a reference and dims it by default.

Method

From meshes to a clickable atlas.

1 · Landmarks

Bony landmarks were derived from the geometry itself: menton as the lowest midline mandible point; pogonion as the most anterior midline point of the lower symphysis; gonion as the most posterior-inferior point of each angle; condylion as the top of each condyle; nasion as the deepest point of the anterior midline profile at the frontonasal junction; glabella as the most anterior point of that profile above it; zygion as the most lateral point of each zygomatic bone; the mental foramen column from the lower second premolar; the orbital rim and globe from the maxilla, zygoma and sclera meshes; the supraorbital and supratrochlear exits from the dataset's own nerve meshes.

2 · Registration

The canonical face was fitted to the skull with a piecewise-linear vertical warp through six paired levels (hairline, nasion, globe centre, anterior nasal spine, incisal edge, menton), one symmetric width scale fitted on the bizygomatic and bigonial pairs, an isotropic depth scale, a small vertical shear anchored at nasion and pogonion, and a piecewise depth offset so the surface sits at published adult male soft-tissue thicknesses: about 6.5 mm at nasion, 11 mm at pogonion, 7 mm below menton, 9 mm lateral of the arch, 14 mm at subnasale, 13 mm at the upper lip, 10 mm of lid over the globe (cephalometric soft-tissue norms after Holdaway, and Arnett and Bergman).

3 · Rendering and vectorising

Three orthographic views (front, right profile, three-quarter) at five pixels per millimetre were rendered in headless Chromium with a physically based shading model, once as a shaded image and once as an identity pass in which every structure carried a unique flat colour. Each structure's visible region was traced from the identity pass into an SVG path, so a click lands on the actual visible outline of the actual bone. Overlays are constructed in millimetres from the 3D landmarks and projected through the same camera, so they stay registered in every view.

Reference skull dimensions, on bone: 128 mm across the zygomatic arches, 77 mm across the mandibular angles, 119 mm from nasion to menton. Vessel courses in the atlas are schematic paths through the measured waypoints cited below; retaining ligament and muscle outlines are drawn from their textbook attachments on this skull's own landmarks.

Literature

The study behind each number.

Listed in the order the atlas and the instruments use them. Where a value differs between populations or methods, the range is given and the atlas uses the male or adult mean.

Used forSource and value
Mental foramenPanoramic radiographs, 207 adults: mean 11.83 ± 1.83 mm above the inferior border (men 12.27 ± 1.70 mm), most often below the second premolar. Mean Distance of Mental Foramen from Inferior Border of Mandible among Patients Visiting the Outpatient Dental Department in a Tertiary Care Centre, JNMA 2023 (PMC10579758). Other series: 13.3 mm (CBCT), 15.5 mm (Korean cadavers).
Facial artery60 fresh-frozen cadavers: distance from the artery to gonion 3.34 ± 0.36 cm (right) and 3.23 ± 0.34 cm (left); to pogonion 7.05 ± 0.66 and 7.10 ± 0.65 cm; the crossing lies at about 32 per cent of the mandibular length from gonion, a proportion independent of jaw size. The Evaluation of Facial Artery Position in Related to Soft Tissue Pogonion and Soft Tissue Gonion: A Cadaver Study, 2024 (PubMed 39412254). Course and branches: standard anatomy (antegonial notch anterior to the masseter; inferior and superior labial, lateral nasal, angular).
Infraorbital foramenCadaver study, 47 subjects, 94 sides: 8.5 ± 2.2 mm below the inferior orbital rim in men, 7.8 ± 1.6 mm in women; 27.7 ± 4.3 mm from the facial midline in men. Anatomic characteristics of the infraorbital foramen: a cadaver study, J Oral Maxillofac Surg 2000 (PubMed 10981979). CBCT, 105 Lebanese adults: 7.98 ± 1.41 mm below the rim (PMC6957048).
Supraorbital notch or foramenCombined cadaveric and dry-skull study, 66 orbits: mean 25.24 ± 3.78 mm from the midline to the foramen and 22.69 mm to the notch (PMC11799115); cadaver heads: 23.5 ± 3.7 mm right, 22.8 ± 3.8 mm left; MRI with dissection: 22.6 to 22.8 mm. In the atlas the exits are taken from the dataset's own nerve geometry, which fall within these ranges.
Transverse facial arteryCadaver dissection: mean vertical distance from the artery's origin to the upper border of the zygomatic arch 26.6 ± 8.2 mm; the artery is found in an 8.8 mm wide band beginning 17.0 mm below the lower border of the arch. CT angiography and cadaver series: 15.49 ± 7.56 mm below the arch's inferior border, range 3.4 to 28.6 mm. The transverse facial artery anatomy: implications for plastic surgery procedures, PLOS ONE 2019 (PMC6366864); Transverse Facial Artery Morphometry, Aesthetic Surgery Journal 2026 (PMC13016736).
Superficial temporal arteryThe artery ascends within the preauricular cheek and bifurcates into frontal and parietal branches; the frontal branch is most tortuous one to three centimetres above the arch as it turns into the mobile forehead. Park et al., The Superficial Temporal Artery and Zygomatico-Orbital Artery: Superficial Arterial Distribution of the Anterior Temple Area, BioMed Research International 2022; CT-angiographic danger-zone mapping of the temporal region, Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 2026.
Retaining ligamentsFurnas D.W., The retaining ligaments of the cheek, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 1989, 83(1): 11 (zygomatic and mandibular ligaments). Mendelson B.C. and colleagues on the masseteric cutaneous ligaments and the orbital retaining ligament (Muzaffar, Mendelson and Adams, PRS 2002). Positions in the atlas are drawn from these attachments on the reference skull's own landmarks.
Bizygomatic and bigonial widthsFarkas L.G., Anthropometry of the Head and Face, 2nd edition, Raven Press 1994; North American white young adults: face width (zygion to zygion) 139.1 mm in men and 130.0 mm in women; mandible width (gonion to gonion) 97.1 mm in men and 91.1 mm in women, by spreading caliper. Ratio 0.70 in men.
Labiomental (mentolabial) angleNaini F.B., Cobourne M.T., Garagiola U., McDonald F., Wertheim D., Mentolabial angle and aesthetics: a quantitative investigation of idealized and normative values, Maxillofacial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 2017, 39: 4 (PMC5292106). Silhouettes rated by 185 observers: 107 to 118 degrees most attractive; up to about 140 acceptable; below 98 or above 162 very unattractive. The Codex's working normal range is 110 to 130 degrees, with 110 as its numeric threshold.
Nasolabial angleArmijo B.S., Brown M., Guyuron B., Defining the ideal nasolabial angle, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 2012, 129(3): 759. Ideal range 93.4 to 98.5 degrees in men (mean 95.96) and 95.5 to 100.1 in women (mean 97.7), from rated photograph series; the classical range in the literature is 90 to 110 (men toward the lower end).
Nasofrontal anglePowell N., Humphreys B., Proportions of the Aesthetic Face, Thieme 1984: aesthetic range 115 to 130 degrees, with men toward the upper part of the range.
Facial convexityLegan H.L., Burstone C.J., Soft tissue cephalometric analysis for orthognathic surgery, Journal of Oral Surgery 1980, 38: 744. Angle of facial convexity (glabella, subnasale, soft-tissue pogonion) 12 ± 4 degrees of deviation from a straight line, that is 168 ± 4 degrees as measured by the instrument.
E-lineRicketts R.M., Esthetics, environment, and the law of lip relation, American Journal of Orthodontics 1968, 54: 272. In a pleasing adult profile the upper lip lies about 4 mm and the lower lip about 2 mm behind the line from the nasal tip to the soft-tissue pogonion.
True verticalArnett G.W., Bergman R.T., Facial keys to orthodontic diagnosis and treatment planning, parts I and II, American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics 1993; Arnett G.W. et al., Soft tissue cephalometric analysis, AJODO 1999, 116: 239. The true vertical line passes through subnasale with the head in natural position; the soft-tissue chin of a balanced profile lies a few millimetres behind it, men slightly more than women.
Gonial angleAdult cephalometric norms commonly 120 to 130 degrees; for example 123.7 ± 5.1 degrees in normodivergent men in a lateral cephalogram series (JNMA 2021, PMC8673450) and mean 126 to 127 degrees in an anthropometric series with no significant sex difference. Values below this range read as a squarer, more defined angle.
Facial thirdsThe classical canon of equal vertical thirds (trichion to glabella, glabella to subnasale, subnasale to menton), with the lower third divided at the stomion into one third upper lip and two thirds lower lip and chin; Farkas (1994) documents the real-population departures from the canon.
Calibrated masculinityPerrett D.I. et al., Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness, Nature 1998, 394: 884. Little A.C., Jones B.C., DeBruine L.M., Facial attractiveness: evolutionary based research, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 2011, 366: 1638.
The Codex documents

What the doctrine is quoted from.

Every statement of doctrine on this site is drawn from Dr Band's locked documents at the versions below. Status vocabulary in the Codex is honest and is honoured here: LOCKED, DRAFT, TBC.

DocumentVersionWhat this site takes from it
The Band Codex, Master Referencev1.0 · 11 August 2026Definition, what the Codex is not, the two-pillar architecture, the retirement of GUARD, the vocabulary.
READ, full referencev3.1 locked 14 July 2026 · reference v1.0, 11 August 2026The fourteen items, the seven question lines and follow-ups, the observed domains, the four gates, plan assembly and the constraint hierarchy, what v3.1 dropped.
BUILD, full referencespine v0.10 locked 7 July 2026 · reference v1.0, 11 August 2026The five steps, archetypes and signatures, the plane register, the universal doctrines (filler as implant, the Believability Stop, tissue restraint, anti-feminisation, the universal restraint rule), Link's three exceptions, Detail's tier exemption.
The Band Codex, context file for the site buildv2.0 · 13 July 2026The brand system (palette, type, marks), the eleven doctrines, the lexicon.
Injection Points Referencev1.0 · August 2026Consulted for accuracy only. It is the working manual and is not published; nothing from its coordinate layer appears on this site.

Site built September 2026. Corrections: info@drband.com.