Women Seen as Younger When Facial Features Stand Out

Facial contrast is a cross-cultural cue to age perception, observers perceive women with increased facial contrast as younger, regardless of the ethnic background.

First impressions of people can develop from a glimpse. A study in open access journal Frontiers in Psychology show that aspects of facial contrast, a measure of how much facial features stand out in the face, decrease with age in women across a variety of ethnic groups.

The study also shows that observers perceive women with increased facial contrast as younger, regardless of the ethnic background of the women or the observers. This suggests that facial contrast is a cross-cultural cue to age perception.

Which Facial Features are You Most Likely to Inherit
The notion that our genes control our face is self-evident. Many of us have facial traits that clearly resemble those of our parents and identical twins are often indistinguishable.

‘People could actively modify how old they look, by altering how much their facial features stand out. People of different cultures use facial contrast as a cue for perceiving age from the face.’

Our age can influence how other people see and treat us. For many people, maintaining a youthful appearance is important, as they perceive this as more attractive and a sign of health. But what makes one face look older than another? Some signs of aging, such as wrinkles, are well-known and common across different ethnicities, but others are less understood.

A French research team, in collaboration with American researchers, have discovered one such aspect of aging -- facial contrast.

"Facial contrast refers to how much the eyes, lips and eyebrows stand out in the face in terms of how light or dark they are or how colorful they are," says Aurélie Porcheron, a researcher involved in the study.

Why Some People are Unable to Use Facial Features to Recognize a Person
The earliest face-selective responses, those recorded approximately 170 milliseconds after seeing a face, are altered in people with congenital prosopagnosia.

Previous studies have shown that increased facial contrast is a cue to perceiving increased health, youthfulness and femininity. However, most previous studies have involved Caucasian faces or Caucasian observers, making it difficult to know if the findings are applicable to other ethnicities.

While people of different ethnicities can have different skin colors, age-related changes in skin color tend to be similar. Porcheron and her colleagues speculated that the relationship between facial contrast and aging might be similar across different ethnicities.

Study Finds That Sleep Deprivation Affects Facial Features Like Eyes, Mouth and Skin
Facial features like eyes, mouth and skin are affected by sleep deprivation. A new study has found that these features function as signs of sleep loss to other people.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers studied images of women of different ethnicities, including Chinese Asian women, Latin American women, South African women and French Caucasian women. To avoid differences caused by gender, the study focused exclusively on women. The women were aged from 20 to 80, and the researchers analyzed their facial images using computer software to measure various facial contrast parameters.

The research team found that while there were some small differences, several aspects of facial contrast decreased with age in all four groups of women, including contrast around the mouth and eyebrows. This indicates that at least some aspects of facial contrast naturally decline with age in women from around the world.

Men With Hint of Redness on Facial Features Appear More Attractive to Women
Men who have a hint of redness on their facial features are more likely to be found attractive by women as they are seen as dominant alpha males.

The researchers then investigated whether people from different cultures pick up on these changes when perceiving how old someone is. To test this, they used photographs of women of a variety of ages, from the same four ethnic groups. This time, they used computer software to generate two versions of each face, one with high contrast, the other with low contrast.

The research team invited male and female volunteers from two different cultural backgrounds, France and China, to choose the younger-looking face between the two versions of each face. The participants chose the high facial contrast face as the young face almost 80% of the time, regardless of the cultural origin of the participant or the face.

"People of different cultures use facial contrast as a cue for perceiving age from the face, even though they are not consciously aware of it," says Porcheron. "The results also suggest that people could actively modify how old they look, by altering how much their facial features stand out, for example by darkening or coloring their features."

Source-Eurekalert