Same Face, Twenty Years Apart: What Looksmaxxing Gets Wrong About Aging
Here's the thing about New York: everyone is always measuring something. Rent per square foot. Minutes to the train. How long he took to text back. So I shouldn't have been surprised when, somewhere between Fulton Street and home, a twenty three year old on my phone announced that her canthal tilt was "negative." She said it the way you'd confess a bad breakup at brunch. Then she measured her jaw with a protractor app.
Welcome to looksmaxxing. If you haven't been introduced, it's a corner of the internet where faces get appraised like a prewar walk up: good bones, questionable light, priced accordingly. Maxilla, gonial angle, interpupillary distance. Women picked it up this year with real enthusiasm, and suddenly my friends, women who once couldn't name a single bone below the cheek, are discussing their jawlines over martinis.
And I couldn't help but wonder: if we're all so busy inspecting the bones, is anyone looking at the light?
The experiment that should have gone viral
In 2006, a group of researchers did something quietly brilliant. They photographed 170 women, ages 11 to 76, and then digitally placed every single one of them onto the exact same face. Same bone structure. Same features. Same surface texture, with every line and wrinkle smoothed away.
The only thing they left alone was how color was spread across each woman's skin. The brown spots. The patches. The places where tone pooled a little darker or faded a little lighter.
Then they asked strangers to do what New Yorkers do best. Judge. Specifically, to guess how old each face was.
The answers ranged from about 18 to about 37. Nearly twenty years, on one face, with one canthal tilt, and one jawline. The researchers concluded that the way color is distributed across the skin can account for up to twenty years of apparent age, completely independent of facial shape.
I read that twice, set down my coffee, and stared out the studio window like a woman in a romantic comedy who has just realized she's been dating the wrong guy.
Because think about it. We've all been obsessing over the frame, and that study held the frame perfectly still. People still saw two decades of difference. Not in the bones. In the skin. It's a little like blaming the dress when it was the lighting all along.
But that was 2006
Fair. 2006 was the year of flip phones and side bangs, and we've all moved on from at least one of those. We have better sunscreens now, smarter devices, and an entirely new vocabulary for our faces.
What hasn't changed is the human eye. In 2023, a team publishing in Scientific Reports tested how color affects the way people estimate age. They found that color information on its own shifts how old a face looks, and that it even makes strangers agree with each other more about the answer. Twenty years later, we're still reading color.
So here's where I've landed, after fourteen years of looking at skin closer than most people look at anything: the face people respond to isn't a set of angles. It's a surface that catches light. When color is even, light moves across it smoothly, and the face reads as rested. When it's scattered with spots and patches, the eye catches every one of them, even when it can't tell you why. Bone structure is the first date. Skin is the relationship.
So who's been scattering the light?
If even color is the goal, the next question is the obvious one. What breaks it up? In my experience, and in the research, the usual suspects keep showing up. And like most bad influences in this city, they rarely act alone.
Inflammation, the slow burn. Researchers now have a name for the low, constant hum of inflammation that comes with getting older: inflammaging. A 2021 review in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology describes how that chronic, low level inflammation wears down the skin's structure and leaves it more fragile over time. On the surface, you see it as the blotchy, persistent kind of redness that never quite calms down, and as pigment that lingers long after whatever irritated your skin is gone. Not the healthy flush after a brisk walk along the river. The kind that sticks around like an ex who won't return your keys.
Picking, the habit we all deny. I know. You were just going to touch it. Then you were just going to fix it. But every time skin is broken, it responds with inflammation, and inflammation can leave a mark behind called post inflammatory hyperpigmentation. A 2026 review in the Journal of Cutaneous Medicine and Surgery names picking right alongside acne as a trigger, and notes those marks tend to be more pronounced in deeper skin tones. The blemish lasts a week. The mark it leaves can last months. That is a terrible trade, and I say that with love.
Smoking, the relationship that takes more than it gives. In 2013, plastic surgeons studied 79 pairs of identical twins where one twin had smoked longer than the other. Same genes, same starting face. The twins who smoked longer showed more under eye bags, deeper lines around the mouth, and more sagging in the lower face. Even a five year difference in smoking history was visible.
Drinking, the friend who always says one more. A 2019 survey of 3,267 women found that eight or more drinks a week was associated with under eye puffiness, loss of fullness in the midface, and more visible blood vessels, which is exactly the kind of uneven color the eye picks up first. I'm not here to take away your Friday martini. I'm just here to tell you she keeps receipts.
Sugar, the sweet talker. When blood sugar runs high, sugar molecules bind to collagen and elastin, the fibers that keep skin firm and springy. The result is called advanced glycation end products, fittingly abbreviated AGEs. A 2010 paper in Clinics in Dermatology explains that this process stiffens those fibers, interferes with the skin's ability to repair itself, and gets worse with sun exposure. Dessert isn't the enemy. A daily drip of sugar, all day, every day, is a different story.
None of this is about perfection, or guilt, or never having a croissant again. It's about understanding that your face keeps a running tab. Every flare, every pick, every late night adds a little something to the bill, and the eye reads it as age long before you'd ever call it that.
What this means for you
You cannot negotiate with your maxilla. Your skin, on the other hand, is listening to everything you do. It may be the only relationship in this city that actually rewards consistency.
Sunscreen, every single day. Brown spots are often the long memory of sun exposure, and sun makes glycation worse too. Broad spectrum, reapplied, rain or shine, subway or rooftop.
Calm before correct. Irritated skin is inflamed skin. Stop scrubbing your way out of it, and treat a calm barrier as the foundation, not the reward.
Hands off. If something needs to come out, let a professional handle it properly. Your fingers are not sterile instruments, no matter how confident they feel at midnight.
Watch the running tab. Smoking, heavy drinking, and sugar all day long show up on your face eventually. Small, consistent changes count more than dramatic ones.
Respect the order of operations. Uneven color doesn't have a single cause, so it doesn't have a single fix. Corrective work means assessing first, then building a plan, then giving it the time it actually needs.
Be suspicious of anything that promises overnight. Pigment is patient. Your plan has to be too.
So, about that canthal tilt
I'm not here to tell anyone to break up with their curiosity. Curiosity is how most of my clients find me. I just want it pointed somewhere it can actually go.
Because when you strip away the protractor apps and the jargon, the research is telling us something almost romantic. The thing people notice isn't the frame. It's the light.
And light, unlike the man who swore he'd call, is something we can actually work with.
If you're ready to stop measuring and start correcting, every new client at Skinlikeb begins with a consultation at my studio in the Financial District. We'll look at your skin together and build a plan that fits it.
Brittany Blancato is a licensed New York State esthetician and the founder of Skinlikeb, a private corrective skincare studio at 161 Water Street in Manhattan's Financial District.
Sources
Fink, Grammer and Matts (2006). Visible skin color distribution plays a role in the perception of age, attractiveness, and health in female faces. Evolution and Human Behavior.
Hsieh, Boyce, Goddard and Clifford (2023). Colour information biases facial age estimation and reduces inter observer variability. Scientific Reports.
Pilkington, Bulfone Paus, Griffiths and Watson (2021). Inflammaging and the Skin. Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
Yadav et al. (2026). A Review of Post Inflammatory Pigmentation Changes. Journal of Cutaneous Medicine and Surgery.
Okada, Alleyne, Varghai, Kinder and Guyuron (2013). Facial Changes Caused by Smoking: A Comparison Between Smoking and Nonsmoking Identical Twins. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
Goodman et al. (2019). Impact of Smoking and Alcohol Use on Facial Aging in Women. Journal of Clinical and Aesthetic Dermatology.
Danby (2010). Nutrition and aging skin: sugar and glycation. Clinics in Dermatology.
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