We all have that auntie who is 45 but look like she’s 32. Or a grandma well into her 70s who looks 50. Now we have the scientific reason why, and it has everything to do with our genes. Olay teamed up with Harvard Medical School Dermatology professor Dr Alexa Kimball to study the skin aging process over the course of women’s lifetimes, from the 20s to the 70s.
The MDE study, which was initiated in 2012, marries genotypic and phenotypic science and examines women in nearly every decade of life – from their 20s to their 70s – and across ethnicities – Caucasian, African, Hispanic and Asian.
And the study conclusively found that black women do, indeed, age at a much slower rate. Any black person could have told them that, but the interesting thing is that it doesn’t just have to do with the melanin in our skin. It goes deeper than that.
In Olay’s Multi-Decade and Ethnicity Study we have found that women of African-American background aged slower than women of Caucasian background as far as skin appearance was concerned. In fact, the aging process seemed to be slowed down by about 10 years. We believe this is not just due to the higher melanin content in their skin which serves as natural UV protection—although it certainly plays a role. We are now studying the exact molecular pathways in dark and light skin more closely to determine what drives this apparently slower skin aging process…
We have definitely seen that women of African-American background aged comparatively slower [that Caucasian women]. The study also revealed twice as many exceptional skin agers in this group—women who looked more than 10 years younger than their real age—than in the Caucasian study group. This does not mean women of African-American background don’t experience visible skin aging, but on average less/ later than lighter skin types.
Two snaps. #blackgirlmagic