Smiling can add years to your face

Time to rethink your grinning Tinder picture
Can smiling age your face?
Shutterstock / ESB Professional
Liz Connor12 May 2017

People have been told for years that smiling can add years onto your face - the more you smile the more wrinkles you get.

Now scientists have taken the age-old beauty myth one step further, claiming that the mere act of pulling a grin in a photograph could instantly make you look much older than if you wear a blank expression.

A new study, published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review Journal, has suggested that being a smiley person can add on as many as two years to your face.

Researchers displayed an array of images of the same people either smiling, expressionless or looking shocked to a group of 40 participants.

With each image, the group were asked to feedback the perceived age of the person.

The experiment showed participants perceived the surprised faces as the youngest and smiling faces the oldest, which contradicts the popular belief that smiling makes you look younger.

“We associate smiling with positive values and youth,” said study co-author Melvyn Goodale, director of the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University.

“Think of all the skin-care and toothpaste companies that sell the same idea every day.

People after 1,2 and 3 glasses of wine

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“The striking thing was that when we asked participants afterwards about their perceptions, they erroneously recalled that they had identified smiling faces as the youngest ones.

“They were completely blind to the fact they had ‘aged’ the happy-looking faces.

“Their perceptions and their beliefs were polar opposites.”

The reason you subconsciously associate smiling faces with older age, is likely due to the fact that smiling forms wrinkles around our eyes, whereas a surprised look keeps our face wrinkle-free.

So next time you want to give someone attractive ‘the eye’ across the Tube carriage, perhaps it's best not to turn that frown upside down.

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