Plastic surgery seems to make people look about 8.9 years younger than their actual age, researchers from the University of Toronto and NorthShore University Health System reported in Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery.
Jeremy P. Warner, M.D., and team set out to determine how much younger esthetic facial surgical procedures made people look, in order to measure surgical success.
They gathered data on 60 patients who had all undergone facial plastic surgeries. They were aged between 45 and 72 years. The patients were divided into three groups:
- Face and neck lift group
- Face and neck lift and eyelid work (blepharoplasty) group
- Eyelid work, and face, neck and forehead lifts
Forty medical students were asked to guess the age of people shown to them in photographs. They looked at pictures of patients before and after surgery.
The researchers found that:
- Photographs taken before surgery – students guessed they were 1.7 years younger than they actually were (average)
- Photographs taken after surgery – overall (all three groups), students guessed they were 8.9 years younger than they actually were
- Face and neck lift group – 5.7 year change in perceived age
- Face and neck lift and eyelid work – 7.5 years change in perceived age
- Eyelid work, and face, neck and forehead lifts – 8.5 year change in perceived age
The medical students were fairly similar in how they perceived people’s ages.
The authors explained that their study differs from previous ones in that it quantified how much younger the medical students thought the people in the photographs were after undergoing surgery. They added that the more facial surgeries people do, the younger their perceived age becomes.
The authors wrote:
“This effect is more substantial when the number of surgical procedures is increased, an effect unrelated to the preoperative age of a patient and unaffected by other variables that we investigated. The ability to perceive age correctly is accurate and consistent.”
Written by Christian Nordqvist