Temperature tells: How facial hot spots can reveal how well you are aging

A person’s face is worth a thousand words. Tiny muscles beneath the skin dictate whether we grin or grimace, scrunch up our faces, or stick out our tongues. Both anxiety and excitement fill the capillaries of our cheeks with blood, which may even turn pink, and warm with embarrassment or exhilaration. When we’re truly terrified when we think we’ve just seen a ghost, the blood drains, and our face becomes a cold, pale mask.

The temperature of a person’s face also offers a gold mine of insight into their physical health. A common example includes checking forehead temperature with the back of one’s hand: one of the most reliable home methods of determining if a fever is coming on. Intrigued by the intricacies of our face, a team of Chinese researchers led a study in July 2024 and found that facial temperature can also provide clues to understanding the mysterious and inevitable process of aging. In particular, the team studied how hot and cold spots on the face can predict biological age and detect signs of certain chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure and diabetes.

Using a specialized camera and ThermoFace, a thermal infrared 3D modeling program, the researchers captured and combined the thermal facial images of nearly 3,000 Han Chinese adult individuals from ages 21 to 88. A distinct aggregate 3D thermal face model — or face mesh — was created for each decade of age to study the trend of facial temperature across adulthood. The team discovered that while the temperature around the eyes tends to increase with age, the temperature of the nose rapidly decreases with age. Therefore, there is reason to believe that people with warmer noses actually have a younger “thermal age.”

By comparing the thermal facial images of participants in the same age group, the researchers also found that eye area temperature and cheek temperatures were associated with metabolic disorders and other conditions associated with aging. Specifically, people with diabetes and fatty liver disease generally had higher eye area temperatures than individuals of the same age without these diseases. Participants with higher cheek temperatures were more likely to have chronic hypertension than their counterparts with lower cheek temperatures. Genetic analysis of the participants’ blood cells indicated that this increased temperature around the eyes and in the cheeks was due to the activation of molecular pathways associated with DNA repair and immune response. In other words, the participants who internally dealt with inflammation and infection externally exhibited warmer facial temperatures.

Of course, the ThermoFace cannot show cause and effect, and there are a myriad of factors that contribute to facial temperature. The study found that consistent exercise over two weeks increased the average nose temperature of the participants, making them thermally five years younger. It also goes without saying that the research team had no way of controlling for facial hot spots caused by the emotional state of the participants. Still, aging specialist Vadim Gladyshev of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study, posits that “For practical [research] purposes, it’s very useful.” The ThermoFace may be able to signal to healthcare providers that something is wrong inside the patient.

Incredibly, this study is one of the first to suggest that facial temperature can be used as a biomarker for aging and chronic diseases. “Aging is a natural process,” explained computational biologist Jing-Dong Jackie Han of Peking University, who was involved in the study. “But our tool has the potential to promote healthy aging and help people live disease-free.” Perhaps the implications of this study could make early disease detection and intervention become easier than ever, and ThermoFace could become as ubiquitous in clinical settings as the thermometer.

“ThermoFace could become as ubiquitous in clinical settings as the thermometer.”