It doesn’t matter if your one of the “lucky ones” that seems to have found the formula for eternal youth thanks to good genes or to a cosmetic touchup. You might be able to “fool” the mirror, but the 3D image of your face doesn’t lie. At least that is what a study published by Cell Research, carried out by a team lead by Jing-Dong Han, computational biology professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Partner Institute of Shanghai, ensures. 

To develop the study, investigators analyzed the faces of 332 Chinese volunteers between the ages of 17 and 77, with the help of a facial scanner named 3dMDface System. The result was a type of facial algorithm or map that enables the age of a person to be guessed, with a margin of error of about six years (more or less), based on four parameters: the team found that when aging the size of the mouth increases, the nose becomes wider and the distance between the mouth and the nose becomes greater, while the corners of the eyes droop. Though these are not the only indicators observed, the 3D analysis of these faces also showed that the faces of those who are younger are smoother and thinner, while mature faces accumulate fat and have thicker cheeks. 

Another conclusion derived from the study is the relation between the age of the face and the inner health condition of an individual. Along with the 3D image, researchers extracted samples of blood from the participants showing a correlation between the biological blood markers and age markers. Thus, women with more mature faces had higher levels of “bad cholesterol” and men with “older-looking” faces presented less levels of albumin, as opposed to younger faces.  

The application of this study, however, is in no way related to the field of cosmetics, but rather to that of medicine. One of the main purposes of such study is to apply the results to the field of age-related illnesses.