This article presents a new numerical method for facial reconstruction. The problem is the following: given a dry skull, reconstruct a virtual face that would help in the identification of the subject. The approach combines classical features as the use of a skulls/faces database and more original aspects: (i) an original shape matching method is used to link the unknown skull to the database templates; (ii) the final face is seen as an elastic 3d mask that is deformed and adapted onto the unknown skull. In this method the skull is considered as a whole surface and not restricted to some anatomical landmarks, allowing a dense description of the skull/face relationship. Also, the approach is fully automated. Various results are presented to show its efficiency.