Abstract
Age is a fundamental social dimension and a youthful appearance is of importance for many individuals, perhaps because it is a relevant predictor of aspects of health, facial attractiveness and general well-being. We recently showed that facial contrast—the color and luminance difference between facial features and the surrounding skin—is age-related and a cue to age perception of Caucasian women. Specifically, aspects of facial contrast decrease with age in Caucasian women, and Caucasian female faces with higher contrast look younger (Porcheron et al., 2013). Here we investigated faces of other ethnic groups and raters of other cultures to see whether facial contrast is a cross-cultural youth-related attribute. Using large sets of full face color photographs of Chinese, Latin American and black South African women aged 20–80, we measured the luminance and color contrast between the facial features (the eyes, the lips, and the brows) and the surrounding skin. Most aspects of facial contrast that were previously found to decrease with age in Caucasian women were also found to decrease with age in the other ethnic groups. Though the overall pattern of changes with age was common to all women, there were also some differences between the groups. In a separate study, individual faces of the 4 ethnic groups were perceived younger by French and Chinese participants when the aspects of facial contrast that vary with age in the majority of faces were artificially increased, but older when they were artificially decreased. Altogether these findings indicate that facial contrast is a cross-cultural cue to youthfulness. Because cosmetics were shown to enhance facial contrast, this work provides some support for the notion that a universal function of cosmetics is to make female faces look younger.
Highlights
Age is a fundamental social dimension that drives social behaviors in professional and personal contexts
We measured facial contrast using sets of Chinese, Latin American and black South African female faces to determine whether facial contrast decreases with age in these three ethnic groups of faces, to the Caucasian faces measured in Porcheron et al (2013)
Facial contrast decreases with age, whereas a positive coefficient indicates an increase of contrast with age
Summary
Age is a fundamental social dimension that drives social behaviors in professional and personal contexts. It is actual or chronological age that predicts a person’s treatment by others; the apparent age is a major motivating factor for many individuals, though there are evident marked cultural differences in the amount of emphasis placed on the apparent age of social partners (Anzures et al, 2010). Skin texture (wrinkles) and skin color homogeneity (hyper-pigmentation) are good predictors of perceived age in Caucasian (Nkengne et al, 2008; Gunn et al, 2009) and Chinese (Mayes et al, 2010) faces. Studies showing experimentally the cross-cultural validity of facial cues to a youthful appearance are lacking, as is work with racial groups other than Caucasians and East Asians
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