Fifteen years ago, a woman came into plastic surgeon Daniel Mills’s office asking for a consult on a face-lift. “She said she was 63 or 64, and this was her second face-lift,” Mills recalls. The day before the surgery, the patient revealed a secret she’d been keeping from her doctor: “Truly, this isn’t my second face-lift; it’s my fourth,” Mills says she told him.
Actually, make that two secrets: “And I’m not 64, I’m 74.”
But this second piece of news wasn’t the shock the patient may have imagined it to be. Mills, currently the president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, already had an inkling, based on the woman’s skin and hands, that she might have been older than she claimed. Using a person’s appearance to determine their age is a skill that comes with the territory for plastic surgeons — “Obviously, it’s our business, so we should be pretty good at it,” Mills says — but new research shows just how finely honed that skill can be: In a study published last week in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, plastic surgeons could estimate a person’s age, accurate to within ten months, by just looking at a photo.
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