Across the developed world, looking older than your chronological age is considered a drawback. Western societies value physical beauty and vitality while science is actively trying to find a way to reverse the ageing process altogether.
This is probably why a study published in the latest issue of The Australasian Journal of Dermatology, that concluded Australian women report more severe signs of facial ageing sooner than other women, received a fair amount of media coverage.
It generated alarming headlines such as:
Why Aussie women are ageing up to 20 years faster than US women
Like the research paper itself, these articles focused on photoageing – the damage done to our skin by exposure to high UV levels. But there is quite a bit more to the ageing process than wrinkles and crow’s feet. And the “20 years faster” claim also deserves scrutiny.
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How was the study done?
The paper was published in a reputable, peer-reviewed outlet – the official journal of the Australasian College of Dermatologists and the New Zealand Dermatological Society.
The sample was 1,472 women aged 18-75 (averaging late 40s) from Australia, the UK, Canada and the US. They were recruited between December 2013 and February 2014 from an internet-based polling panel.
The women were asked to use a mirror to compare their own facial features to photographs illustrating increasing signs of ageing (from none to severe) for eight different characteristics.
These were static forehead lines, crow’s feet, glabellar (frown) lines, tear troughs (groove between lower eyelid and cheek), mid-face volume loss, nasolabial folds (the two skin folds that run from the nose to the corner of the mouth), oral commissures (the corners of the mouth) and perioral lines (wrinkles around the lips).
They were asked to choose one image – out of four to six (depending on the feature) – that most represented their current facial features in the absence of facial expression.
People were excluded if they had significant facial trauma or burns, or if they’d had any form of plastic surgery, including Botox, fillers or laser treatments.
Skin colour can be categorised by its typical response to UV light: from type one, which is very fair skin that always burns and never tans, to type six, which is dark brown skin that never burns and always tans. In this study, only women with skin types one to three were included.
![](https://cdn.theconversation.com/files/166046/width754/file-20170420-2418-kilq9x.png)
What were the results?
Australian women reported more severe facial lines and higher rates of facial change with age than women from the other countries, particularly those from the US. Though, interestingly, for women in their 70s, the average severity of facial lines was generally similar from country to country.
The researchers then looked at the 30% or more of women who reported moderate or severe ageing for all features. They found that in Australia, this occurred:
from the ages of 30-59 years […] but this proportion of US women did not report this level of severity until the ages of 40–69 years.
This seems to be the crux of the paper, and the finding that underpins the conclusion that we’re ageing 20 years faster than we should be.
The study has many strengths. It is elegantly written and some aspects of the methodology are robust. For example, Asian women experience skin wrinkling later than Caucasian women, and smoking is associated with more skin ageing. So the researchers made sure these factors were not responsible for the results by adjusting their analyses for age, race and smoking status.
The results are certainly plausible and consistent with other studies. People living in Australia are exposed to higher levels of UV radiation, which is responsible for most age-associated cosmetic skin problems in fair-skinned people.
A study of 1,400 randomly selected residents of a Queensland community used casts of the back of the hand and dermatological assessment to show that premature ageing of the skin was associated with high sun exposure during leisure or work.
What is the problem?
![](https://cdn.theconversation.com/files/166434/width237/file-20170424-12640-1wrfeks.jpg)
There are two main limitations of the study. First, the differences in self-reported facial lines may be statistically significant across countries, but this does not mean they are clinically significant.
Figures in the research plot the average severity of each line against age, with different colours representing each of the four countries.