Changes with age
Features that come with time, such as lines and a receding hairline. 17 face guides on EveryFaceShape so far.
Some features come with time. Laugh lines and nasolabial folds deepen, wrinkles form, hairlines recede, cheeks and jaws soften, and brows and lashes thin. These changes happen to everyone and are part of a face that has been lived in. Many traditions honour them as signs of age and experience; the cosmetics industry sells products against them.
What changes
Skin makes less collagen and elastin with age, so it creases more where it folds: around the eyes, between the brows, across the forehead and from nose to mouth. Sun speeds this up. Fat pads in the cheeks shift lower, the jaw softens and a double chin may form. Hairlines often rise, especially in men, and eyelids may hood.
Style through the years
Face shape can change with age, so frames and beard styles that suited a face at twenty may be changed at sixty. Barbers often suggest a beard to add definition at a softening jaw. Opticians may suggest lighter frames or varifocals. Portrait painters, from Rembrandt onwards, have treated lined faces as among the most expressive subjects there are.
Famous changes with age face guides
Still to be written: Wrinkle, Jaw.
Further reading
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Freckles: Loyna, CC BY-SA 2.5, source
- Dimple: C. Szeto, CC BY 2.0, source
- Chin: User:Tizio cropped the original to show just the cleft chin, to be sho, Public domain, source
- Nasolabial fold: Mikael Häggström ,, Public domain, source
- Eyelid: Micky Zlimen, CC BY-SA 2.0, source