You’ve probably already been told that you don’t “look your age”: you can look younger, but sometimes you can also look older. Scientists from Rotterdam (Netherlands) have just discovered that this would not necessarily be a good thing.
Their study, published Jan. 10 in the British Journal of Dermatology, included 2,679 women and men aged 51 to 87. Photographs of each of them, from the front as well as from the side, were studied. Their chronological age or medical history was not known. An independent panel was then asked to estimate their year of birth.
This resulted in the calculation of age perceived age, which is nothing other than the difference between their real age and the age assigned to them: thus, the higher the perceived age score, the younger a person appeared. So what did the researchers conclude? “A younger face is associated with a lower likelihood of suffering from several age-related morbidities in middle-to-old-aged people,” they write.
In detail, they specify that looking five years younger is linked to “less osteoporosis”, “less chronic obstructive pulmonary disease”, “less age-related hearing loss”, as well as than “less cataracts”. This would even reflect a “better overall cognitive functioning”. However, scientists have not found a clear explanation for this phenomenon.
“It is likely that the factors that cause (…)
