Luminance Statistics Effects on Skin Age Perception

To investigate how humans visually perceive the quality of their skin, we took photographs of the faces of 118 Japanese women with and without foundation on their skin. Subsequently, we cropped a square patch around the right cheek of every woman to eliminate any global shape cue. In Experiment 1, the age estimation of the skin patch was highly correlated with its real age proving that our skin patches contain enough information for age estimation. Moreover, the results indicated that foundation can change the perceived age of the skin up to 15 years. In Experiment 2, we asked to rate the visual quality of 20 skin patches with respect of 5 scales often used by cosmetologists for classifying the type of skin, and found that the perceived age was highly correlated with the number of wrinkles, the glossiness perception and the quantity of colored spots, whereas the visibility of pores and the color of the skin had low correlation. In Experiment 3, we built artificial images by using a histogram matching technique that modifies the luminance distribution but keeps the color and pattern information intact, and found that the modification of the luminance statistics on the skin texture resulted in a correlated modification in the perceived age assessment which can add or subtract up to 34 years in the perceived age of the skin. Finally, in Experiment 4, we confirmed that the luminance modification relates also with other visual quality cues of the skin. Our results constitute the first step for the development of new cosmetics and quality assessments based on the luminance distribution on the skin.

Arce-Lopera, C. A., Okajima, K., Igarashi, T., Nakao, K. (2010). Luminance Statistics Effects on Skin Age Perception (187th ed.). International Federation of Societies of Cosmetic Chemists (IFSCC).