--- title: Want to Look Younger? Your Eyebrows May Be the Key description: Faces with features that stand out more—like high-contrast eyebrows, lips and eyes—appear younger, according to new research. canonical: https://time.com/4980608/beauty-eyebrows-makeup/ author: Amanda MacMillan article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-10-17T12:00:37.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-23T17:50:44.744Z article:section: Health og:title: Want to Look Younger? Your Eyebrows May Be Key, Study Says og:description: Faces with features that stand out more—like high-contrast brows—appear younger og:url: https://time.com/4980608/beauty-eyebrows-makeup/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2a6333222b5565d3/6988e22bcf40a83dd8c49d5f/eyebrows.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 7360 og:image:height: 4140 og:image:alt: eyebrows og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Want to Look Younger? Your Eyebrows May Be Key, Study Says twitter:description: Faces with features that stand out more—like high-contrast brows—appear younger twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2a6333222b5565d3/6988e22bcf40a83dd8c49d5f/eyebrows.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Want to Look Younger? Your Eyebrows May Be the Key, Study Says > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. by [Amanda MacMillan](https://time.com/author/amanda-macmillan/) ## Amanda MacMillan Oct 17, 2017 12:00 PM UTC  Closeup shot of a beautiful young woman in the studio Closeup shot of a beautiful young woman in the studio Getty Images by [Amanda MacMillan](https://time.com/author/amanda-macmillan/) ## Amanda MacMillan Oct 17, 2017 12:00 PM UTC Maybe there’s some science behind the [dramatic eyebrow trend](http://www.health.com/beauty/better-brows) after all. A new study finds that facial features, like lips and eyebrows, tend to stand out less as people get older. Because of that, the authors say, people perceive faces with more contrast as younger. In the study, [published in the journal _Frontiers in Psychology_](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01208/full), researchers analyzed photographs of 763 makeup-free women with various skin tones between ages 20 and 80\. A computer program analyzed the photos for facial contrast: a measure of how much the eyes, lips and eyebrows stand out due to differences in color, lightness or darkness with the surrounding skin. Younger women had more facial contrast, and older women had less. Contrast especially decreased in areas around the mouth and eyebrows as women got older. Next, the researchers Photoshopped some of the pictures, creating two nearly identical versions of each face with varying levels of contrast. They showed these photographs to volunteers and asked them to choose the younger-looking face. Almost 80% of the time, people said the high-contrast face appeared younger than the low-contrast one. The findings were similar across a variety of ethnicities, suggesting that facial contrast—like wrinkles and changes in skin pigmentation—is truly a “cross-cultural cue” for perceiving how old a person is, the authors wrote in their paper. **MORE**: [Why You Should Let Someone Else Choose Your Tinder Photo](http://time.com/4739340/facebook-tinder-profile-picture/) Anyone who’s ever filtered a selfie on Instagram won’t be surprised by this effect of contrast. But the findings may also help explain why people often use makeup to look younger. The study didn’t involve makeup, so the authors cannot say for sure that darkening features cosmetically would have the same anti-aging results as demonstrated in the study. “But the way we manipulated features in the photos was very similar to what you’d do with makeup, and I would be surprised if you couldn’t get similar effects,” says co-author Richard Russell, associate professor of psychology at Gettysburg College. “We know that lips get less red with age and eyebrows get lighter, for instance, and those are both things that you could address with makeup, if you wanted.” The biggest surprise of all was the power of the brow. For women of all ethnicities, brow color faded with age—so darkening them may really make people look younger, the researchers say. Though the study was only done in women, the findings likely apply to men, too. [Other research](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40750-017-0068-x) suggests that the decline of facial contrast with age is not just true of women, but also true of men. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4980608/beauty-eyebrows-makeup/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4980608/beauty-eyebrows-makeup/"},"headline":"Want to Look Younger? 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