Slap on the make-up if you want to look young

APPLYING eye shadow, lipstick and mascara may take up valuable minutes every morning. But make-up really does make women look younger, a scientific study has concluded.

Using bold shades of lipstick and eye shadow, as well as a good eyebrow pencil, can roll back the years by making facial features more vivid.

Psychologists have discovered we judge how youthful someone looks by the extent to which their eyes, eyebrows and mouth stand out against their skin. However, as women age, decades of exposure to the sun make the skin darker and more red in tone, reducing that contrast.

When researchers digitally altered women’s faces to lessen the contrast between skin and facial features, nearly 80 per cent

‘Making the lips redder’

of people judged those women to be older. The authors say using make-up to make the eyes and mouth darker against the skin could therefore make females look younger.

Co-author Dr Richard Russell, from Gettysburg College in the US, said: ‘In terms of make-up, one thing which could be drawn from this study would be that if you are a woman who is older and desiring to look younger, darkening the eyebrows and eyes and making the lips redder does have the effect of making a face appear somewhat younger.’

While hairstyle and facial shape have been shown to affect how old someone looks, the contrast between the skin and facial features is a new discovery.

The study, which involved women of different ethnicities, is published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.