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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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.
Heavy drinking puts a year onto the faces of both sexes, as does chronic asthma, diabetes or the regular use of painkillers. Excessive exposure to the sun had no effect on perceived ages of men, but added 1.3 years to women’s faces by the time they were in their seventies.
Advertisement
The effects of depression were significantly worse in women than in men. Depressed women looked 3.9 years older, while male sufferers seemed only 2.4 years older.
The findings on the benefits of middle-class affluence are borne out by London mothers, who admit they are frequently complimented on their youthful good looks.
“I don’t work, I don’t have any financial pressure and I’m happy,” said Nicky Kenyon, 38, who lives with her husband and three children in a five- bedroom Victorian house in Streatham.
Nadia Marchant, 39, from Battersea, is a non-working mother who spends two hours a day walking and cycling as she fetches and carries her three sons. “I want to stay fit and in shape,” she said. “Being sporty and athletic is what is going to carry me through my life.”
Richard Madeley, the talk show host, attributes his youthful looks — he will shortly be 50 but looks a decade younger — to staying slim. “I actually think that for men of a certain age, keeping your weight down is the one single factor that counts,” he said.
Advertisement
Sandra Howard, 64, the wife of the former Conservative leader Michael Howard, says her positive outlook is the key to her retention of the looks that her made her famous as a model in the 1960s.
“I think everyone should try to be as happy as they can, and that probably helps with the way you look,” she said. “Being married probably makes you want to look your best for the person you are with, but I would have thought that would apply to unmarried people as well.”
There is still hope for those in middle age who fear their poor lifestyles may already have condemned them to a premature old age. “All is not lost,” said Chris Phillipson, professor of social gerontology at Keele University. “Diet and exercise are crucial factors. You can do an awful lot over the age of 40 to 50 to change the way you experience growing old.”
Additional reporting: Tom Baird