Healthy Beauty

Smiling Makes You Look Younger

Nov. 11, 2011 -- Go ahead and smile. It may be Mother Nature's way of giving you a youthful appearance.

A new study showed that when people looked at photos of happy faces, they guessed the age of the person in the photo as younger than in photos of the same person with a neutral or angry expression.

Researchers say it's the first study to show that facial expressions have a major impact on the accuracy and bias of age estimates.

The study is published in Psychology and Aging.

"Although age estimates can often be based on multiple cues, there are many situations in which a picture of a person's face is the only information that is immediately available," researcher Manuel C. Voelkle of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and colleagues write.

"In particular, with the rise of private- or business-related social networks like Facebook, flickr, LinkedIn, and many others, it has become common practice to share pictures, often without additional background information," they write.