In your face: the secrets of healthy living
(Sunday Times)
Updated: 2006-01-30 14:48

Your face really is your fortune. If you are married, of a higher social class and have fewer than four children, then you probably look younger than you actually are.
By contrast, significant weight loss, a fall in social status and being a lonely singleton can add years to a person’s appearance, researchers have found.

A new study has quantified the impact that a combination of lifestyle, medical history and diet have on how your looks age. According to the public health specialists behind the research, the findings show that a youthful face is an accurate indicator of good health.

“It is a lot more dangerous looking one year older than being one year older,” said Dr Kaare Christensen of the Danish Twin Registry, who led the study, to be published in the journal Age and Ageing.

“If you are not depressed, not lonely, not a smoker and not too skinny, you are basically doing well,” she said. By contrast, looking old for one’s age was linked to increased mortality.

Marriage is more beneficial for a woman, knocking almost two years from her apparent age, but only one year from a man’s appearance.

Yet men benefit more from having children, possibly because they take on less of the burden of childcare. Having one to three children makes a man look a year younger, but makes no difference to how a woman is perceived. The benefits disappear in families with four or more children.

A move up the social scale brings the most dramatic benefits, making a man or a woman look up to four years younger than their true age.

For men, becoming slightly chubbier as you get older has a dramatic effect on helping to maintain a youthful appearance, by helping to straighten the wrinkles. Gaining weight to add two points to one’s body mass index (BMI) will take off a year, whereas a woman would need to add seven points to gain the same effect.

A combination of the various factors explains why some people in their forties can look up to seven years younger than their contemporaries.

A married woman in a high socioeconomic group, who has avoided excessive sun, could appear 7.2 years younger than a single, jobless woman who has indulged in too many hours in a tanning salon.

Men can readily “lose” a decade. An affluent married man with no more than three children will look 10 years younger than a contemporary who is jobless, single and has lost weight to cut his BMI by two points.

The researchers reached their conclusions by asking a group of nurses to guess the ages of 1,826 identical and non-identical twins in their seventies. They then looked at environmental factors including marital status, parenthood and class.

Past scientific studies have established that non-genetic factors account for 40% of the variations in perceived age.

The wizening effect of heavy smoking and drinking is surprisingly modest. A male smoker with a 20-a-day habit must smoke for 20 years to gain a year’s extra wrinkles, while the effects of tobacco smoke on a woman’s skin causes only half the damage.