Why do people's faces get bigger as they get older? (Not because they get fatter)

I don’t know if you have noticed that as people age, they seem to become plump. This is actually a beautiful description. If you look at the essence, it is actually "the face becomes wider" or the face becomes loose.

This is not your illusion or "statistics around you" but a real phenomenon. For example, researchers scanned the faces of men and women of different ages and mapped the changes in their facial aging signs. We can clearly see that with the increase of age, both men and women have shown a significant trend of widening their faces.

There are many factors that cause the face to become loose as we age. Let us introduce them one by one.

Aging of facial ligaments and sagging skin

The first is the facial ligament, which is a very important fiber structure on our face. Ligaments have a certain strength and stiffness. This toughness can fix many tissues on our face and limit their range of motion, which ultimately shows that our face always maintains a basic state. However, as we age, the ligaments begin to age slowly. For example, the ligaments composed of collagen fibers lose collagen and elastic fibers also face aging. As a result, the stretching ability of the face decreases, and the original tissue can no longer be confined to a specific position. Tissues such as fat will begin to sag under the influence of gravity, and as a result, they fill our cheeks and jaws, making our face wider. Secondly, our skin will become loose.

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The main protein component of the skin is collagen. These collagen molecules are tightly combined to form an elastic structure. Collagen is also an important reason why our skin can be firm and elastic. However, with age, the replenishment of collagen in the skin is far less than the loss rate of collagen. As a result, the collagen in the skin is becoming less and less, which shows a loss of elasticity and increasing wrinkles. In addition, sodium hyaluronate, also known as hyaluronic acid, is also an important component of the skin and will be lost with age.

Changes in bones

In addition, our facial bones will also change. Bones are the basic supporting framework that makes up our facial shape. Facial muscles, ligaments and other tissues are often fixed or supported by bones to be stably attached. Therefore, appearance is closely related to bones, so much so that there is a saying of "bone beauty". Many times we tend to think that bones will basically remain unchanged once they mature, but this is actually not accurate. With age, bones will also change, and our body's ability to absorb nutrients will decrease, but some basic functions of the body must rely on some basic nutrients. In this case, bones may become a source of nutrition for the body, a typical example being the familiar calcium. Long-term lack of bone nutrition and absorption will cause the overall skeleton to gradually shrink, thus causing bone changes.

The arrows indicate the direction of bone absorption. When bones change, the facial structures attached to them will lose their strength and begin to sag, resulting in a loose face and a loss of three-dimensionality.

Aging is an ongoing process that begins early

Many people may think that aging is something that happens at a certain age, and even equate aging with old age. But in fact, aging is not a sudden thing, but something that happens very early. For example, some people have conducted a measurement test on aging from multiple dimensions such as physiological, psychological and social, and we can find that these factors are positively correlated with age to a certain extent.

The relationship between age and related indicators. If we put it in a table, we can see that aging is something that happens very early. Even when we are in our 20s, aging has already started and slowly begins to increase.

In addition to these superficial indicators, researchers have also mapped related indicators of aging from the aspects of hormones, gene expression and metabolism. The results show that whether it is hormone changes, transcriptional hanging edges or protein or immunity, they all show obvious changes with age and are highly correlated. This means that our aging does not start at a certain time period, but is a continuous process that starts very early.

The relationship between multiple biological markers and age. It can be seen that many times, what we think of as aging is not exclusive to the elderly, but a long-term event that occurs very early. It’s just that when we are young, we don’t pay much attention to these phenomena, and our body’s repair ability is still good when we are young, so we tend to ignore these phenomena. For this reason, for aging, we should not only focus on the problem of facial fatness, but should pay full attention to a series of problems caused by aging. When aging changes occur, we should also take active and early countermeasures.

References

[1] Windhager, Sonja etal. "Facialaging trajectories: Acommonshapepatterninmaleandfemalefacesisdisruptedaftermenopause." Americanjournalofphysicalanthropologyvol.169,4(2019):678-688.

[2]Alghoul,Mohammed,andMarkACodner. "Retainingligamentsoftheface:reviewofanatomyandclinicalapplications." Aestheticsurgeryjournalvol.33,6(2013):769-82.

[3] Zhao Ye, Wu Sufan. Aging of facial bones. Chinese Journal of Plastic Surgery. 2015;31(6):469-473.

[4][1] Wei Yu, Liu Xing, Li Xiang, et al. Study on the construction of physiological-psychological-social three-dimensional human aging index and scale[J]. Chinese Journal of Disease Control, 2020, 24(01): 67-72.

[5] Li, Jiaming et al. "Determining a multimodalaging clock in Chinese women." Med (New York, NY) vol. 4, 11 (2023): 825-848.e13.

Planning and production

This article is a work of Science Popularization China-Starry Sky Project

Produced by: Science Popularization Department of China Association for Science and Technology

Producer｜China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd.

Author: Li Lei, PhD in Genetics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Review | Feng Jun, Deputy Chief Physician, Dermatology Department, General Hospital of Datong Coal Mine Group Co., Ltd.