Facelifts only make you look slightly younger, and no more attractive: study

TORONTO – If you have been saving your pennies for a fresh new face, research shows you may want to rethink that decision.

Researchers from the University of Toronto, McMaster University and Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City found that, on average, aesthetic facial surgery (i.e. facelifts, necklifts, browlifts) only takes about three years off your perceived age.

More bad news: it doesn’t make you any more attractive.

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Lead author Dr. Joshua Zimm, from the University of Toronto’s School of Medicine and Lenox Hill Hospital, said the team wanted to conduct the study because so many people who undergo facial surgeries do so in order to look younger and more attractive. However, the study authors said, there wasn’t a lot of literature out there on whether facelifts actually had this effect.

At a private plastic surgery practice in Toronto, researchers took pre- and post-operation photographs of 49 patients who received aesthetic facial surgery between July 4, 2006 and July 22, 2010.

The photos were shown to 50 people who, without knowing the objective of the study, were asked to guess the age then rate the attractiveness of each patient on a scale of one to 10.

The average number of “years saved” (that is, the patient’s true age minus the guessed age) was 3.1 years.

Researchers noted that there was a small but “insignificant” increase to the patients’ perceived attractiveness.