Women Wearing Red Lipstick Look Younger. Why?

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Women around the world have literally tens of thousands of choices in lipstick, but the most common shade is red. And as women get older, red lipstick looks better. A research collaboration between psychologists at Gettysburg College in Pennsyvania in the USA and cosmetic chemists in the Research & Development Division at cosmetics giant Chanel have elucidated the reasons why this is the case.

Aging Produces Predictable Cosmetic Problems

Our faces stop growing at about the age of 20, but they continue to change throughout our entire lives. Hormonal changes in women are especially likely to result in the appearance of pigmentation of the skin of the face, in the form of pregnancy spots, age spots, and estrogen-deficiency related patches of dryness and irritation. As the tissues underlying the skin become less flexible, the face gradually begins to develop bags and sags, and the pigments that make the lips more prominent begin to fade at the same time patches of skin get shinier.

The lips are a prominent signal of aging in women. We are "pre-programmed" to recognize a woman's age by subconsciously looking at the height and contrast of her lips to the rest of her face. As the lips grow thinner, their pigment fades, and the lips fail to reflect light as well as they used to, a woman starts to look older.

Women's age is also detected in their eyes. Rounded eyes are perceived as younger. The color and contrast of the eye brows and eyes likewise affect the perception of age. The eye brows and eyes also lose their color as a woman ages, but they continue to reflect light well. A woman's lips not only lose their color over time, they tend to be less reflective as well.

Loss of Contrast Makes Women Look Older 

The Gettysburg College researchers photoshopped images of young, middle aged, and older women to make lips and eyebrows darker or lighter, and more or less luminescent — that is, with more or less shine. The researchers did not photoshop wrinkles, age spots, bags under the eyes, or sagging skin. These were left the same in both photos. Then the scientists asked the students to rank the ages of the women in the three sets of photos as younger or older.

The results of the study were unequivocal. The more contrast there was in the color and luminosity between the eyes and the lips and the rest of the face, the younger the woman in the photo was judged to be (with exceptions in only about 5 percent of viewings). And color contrast was more important to the student participants' perceptions of age than any other facial characteristic.

Lip Gloss Sometimes Does More For A Woman's Appearance Than A Face Lift

Prior to the experiments conducted at Gettysburg College, researchers at other institutions had already established that face lifts often don't get women the responses they want. Even though cosmetic surgery to repair sagging skin or laser resurfacing of sun-damaged skin drastically changes a woman's appearance, women who have these procedures are not necessarily seen as younger as a result.

Why? One study found that when a woman who has passed the age of 40 has a facelift, her apparent age is only reduced by an average of 4.5 years. And that same study found that when a woman past the age of 40 has laser resurfacing to remove wrinkles and age spots, her apparent age is only reduced by an average of 2.5 years.

Cosmetics, however, can do much more to make women look younger. This, in turn, makes you wonder why so many women spend thousands of dollars on risky surgeries when they could simply learn to apply makeup more effectively if looking younger is an important goal for them. Scientific research has confirmed these principles for making makeup sexy:

• One of the cues that men recognize as particularly feminine is the color red. Redness in the lips, around the face, around the neck, or in clothing signals sexual potential to men. Putting a woman's photograph in a red frame will make her more appealing to men. Wearing a red scarf will make a woman look younger. It's not accidental that nun's habits and most women's choices in hijab or chador are black or darkly colored to make the women appear less attractive, or rather more maternal.
• In addition to looking for red, men also respond to the contrast between red tones in the lips and green tones in the rest of the skin of the face. A tiny amount of green in the skin is healthy and natural; it results from the breakdown of hemoglobin in the skin.  As a woman ages, circulation to the skin of her face decreases, and the faint green tint of her skin goes away. Cosmetics can compensate for this. Globs of green eye shadow can (believe it or not) make a woman more attractive at a distance, but the usual way to use green in cosmetics would be to apply green makeup, red makeup, and then flesh-colored foundation (not the other way around, order is important). Of course, many women eschew green makeup entirely -- it's really more useful for covering up pimples (green on the pimple, red on the green, flesh-colored foundation over the first two layers) unless it is used very subtly.
• Lip gloss enhances the effects of lipstick. Making the lips more luminous with lip gloss also compensates for the appearance of aging, although lip gloss won't have this effect with lipstick unless the lipstick is a shade of red.

Two precautionary notes for the interpretation of these results are in order. The Gettysburg researchers worked with photos of Caucasian women. The color contrast that makes women with other than fair skin tones look younger may be different.

And not only did the researchers test their theories of perception with college students aged 18 through 20, they only showed the students photos of women aged 20 to 69. Other cosmetic interventions may be of greater value in enhancing the appeal of girls younger than 20 and women 70 and older. Nonetheless, this is a truly interesting piece of research. The one take-home message would be that makeup can be a better tool than invasive operations — a welcome message for many.