These face maps show the average heat distribution of women 50 to 60 years old who are aging slowly (left), in line with their chronological age (middle) and quickly (right). Reddish spots indicates higher temperatures, whitish spots are cooler spots.
Facial heat maps are providing fascinating insights into how well you’re aging and could even hint at chronic conditions like diabetes.
Imagine a blue background with three facial heat maps: these images show the average heat distribution in women aged 50 to 60 who are aging slowly (left), in line with their chronological age (middle), and quickly (right). Reddish areas indicate higher temperatures, while whitish areas are cooler.
Your face might reveal more than just emotions; it could also provide clues about your biological age—how fast your cells are aging—and even signal chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. This was reported by researchers in the July 2024 issue of Cell Metabolism.
A study analyzing nearly 3,000 Han Chinese participants aged 21 to 88 found that people with metabolic disorders, such as diabetes and fatty liver disease, tend to have higher temperatures around their eyes than their healthy peers. Similarly, those with high blood pressure showed elevated temperatures in the cheek area.
“We can use thermal facial imaging to diagnose these diseases with fairly good accuracy, around 80 percent,” says Jing-Dong Jackie Han, a computational biologist at Peking University in Beijing. “The facial thermal pattern tells you a lot about the state of your health.”
The study also discovered that the nose temperature tends to decrease more rapidly with age than other facial areas, suggesting that a warmer nose might indicate a younger thermal age. Conversely, temperatures around the eyes generally increase with age.
“This approach to quantifying age based on facial thermal images is quite innovative, as it offers an independent assessment of biological age,” says Vadim Gladyshev, an aging specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He notes that facial thermal age could be a new biomarker for aging and a tool for health assessments.
The idea that facial temperature reflects health status partly stems from traditional Chinese medicine, Han explains. It’s well known that fevers and infections can raise body and facial temperatures—just think of a parent checking their child’s forehead for a fever. Studies have shown that core body temperature changes with age, metabolic state, and diseases. Facial heat maps have even been used to detect post-traumatic stress disorder. However, using facial thermal patterns to assess biological age and metabolic diseases had not been thoroughly explored before.
Blood analysis of the study participants offered some clues as to why these thermal maps are so revealing. For example, increased temperatures around the eyes and cheeks are mainly due to heightened cellular activities associated with inflammation, such as repairing damaged DNA and fighting infections.
There are still some uncertainties, such as whether the ThermoFace tool would be as effective in other demographic groups. Additionally, factors like exercise or diet can also influence facial temperatures. For instance, participants in the study who did a daily jumping routine for two weeks showed a reduction in thermal facial age by five years, with increased temperatures around the nose. Interestingly, eating yogurt was also found to affect thermal facial age.
While biological age is linked to disease risk, Gladyshev notes that ThermoFace doesn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship. However, it could serve as an early warning system for clinicians to investigate potential health issues.
“For practical research purposes, it’s very useful,” Gladyshev says. “Whether it could be clinically applied to diagnose diseases in real-world settings remains an open question.”
