The human cranium is the most complex skeletal structure in the human body. It houses the brain and sensory organs, the airways as well as the masticatory apparatus. Precise and well-coordinated growth of cranial components thus is an inevitable prerequisite of functional development of the human head. Presumably, different regimes of stabilizing selection have enforced the evolution of mechanisms that protect aspects of cranial development against perturbations. These mechanisms are important for non-pathological cranial development, but at the same time, they may impede orthodontic and surgical treatment. In this project, we want to explore multivariate patterns of genotype–phenotype association in the human face together with the stability of facial development, i.e., we want to explore and quantify the spatial and temporal pattern of auto-regulation during facial development. Our newly developed statistical methods and empirical results can find application in numerous biological and medical contexts, including medical genetics and neonatology, anthropology, and forensics.