Research suggests people who still look young after 60 aren't always the ones with the best genes, they may also be the ones who spent decades treating their bodies as something worth caring for rather than something to be punished into shape

Somewhere on the internet right now there is a photograph of two 61-year-old women sitting side by side. They are identical twins. One of them looks about a decade older. The caption travelling with it usually claims one twin smoked for sixteen years and sunbathed at every opportunity, and Snopes has had to keep pointing out that the caption invents most of that.

The photograph is real, though. It comes from a study that says something far more useful than any caption ever could.

Same DNA, different faces

In 2009, a plastic surgeon called Bahman Guyuron set up at the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, which is exactly what it sounds like: thousands of pairs of twins in one small town, every August. His team photographed and surveyed 186 pairs of identical twins and had an independent panel guess how old each one looked.

None of it was subtle. The longer a twin had smoked, the older she appeared. More sun exposure meant an older face, and the gap widened with age. Twins who had been through a divorce looked close to two years older than their siblings.

One finding cuts against everything the wellness industry sells. A higher body mass index made twins under 40 look older. After 40, it made them look younger. Volume in the face reads as youth once you are past a certain point. Chasing thinness into your fifties is, on this evidence, an odd strategy.

These women were running identical genetic code. Everything separating those faces happened outside the genome.

Genes are not off the hook

Here is where the popular version of this story overreaches. It has become fashionable to say genes barely matter, and the numbers behind that were real enough. Twin studies put the heritability of lifespan at roughly 20 to 25 per cent. Some large family pedigree studies came in as low as 6 per cent.

Then, in January 2026, a paper in Science argued those figures were badly skewed. The researchers pointed out that older cohorts died in large numbers from accidents and infections, causes that have nothing to do with your biology, and that this noise drags measured heritability down. Correct for it and the heritability of intrinsic lifespan comes out above 50 per cent.

So genes matter more than the folk wisdom allows. Two things are still worth holding onto. That heritability number describes how long people live, not how old a face looks, which is a separate question with its own evidence. And heritability describes variation across a population, not a sentence handed down to any one person.

A face is a status report

Over in New Zealand, the Dunedin study has followed roughly a thousand people, all born in the same year, since birth. Researchers measured biomarkers across the cardiovascular, metabolic, renal, immune, dental and pulmonary systems at ages 26, 32 and 38, then worked out how fast each person was actually deteriorating.

The spread was astonishing: from almost no physiological change per calendar year to nearly three years of it. Same birth year, wildly different rates of wear.

Independent raters, shown facial photographs with no other information, reliably rated the people ageing fastest on the inside as looking older on the outside. By 45, the same fast-ageing group had more cognitive difficulties, signs of advanced brain ageing and diminished sensory-motor function.

Looking young after 60, then, reads as a visible status update on how hard the machinery underneath has been working.

Punishment has a ceiling

Which points at the gym, and at the assumption that if some effort is good, more must be better.

Researchers running the Copenhagen City Heart Study followed 1,098 joggers and 3,950 non-joggers for 12 years. Light joggers had the lowest mortality of anyone. Strenuous joggers had a mortality rate that was not statistically distinguishable from people who did nothing at all. The sweet spot landed at one to two and a half hours a week, spread over two or three sessions, at a slow or average pace.

Treat that carefully. The study was observational, the jogging data was self-reported, and there were so few strenuous joggers that the confidence interval on their result ran from 0.48 to 8.14, which is another way of saying nobody really knows. Other researchers published a direct rebuttal in the same journal.

Still, the burden of proof sits with the people claiming punishment buys youth, and nobody has met it.

The unglamorous stuff

Sleep keeps showing up. One study of 60 women found that good sleepers had lower intrinsic skin ageing scores and recovered about 30 per cent more skin barrier function after it was deliberately disrupted. Worth noting it was small and funded by a cosmetics company, so treat it as a hint rather than a verdict.

Strength holds up better, with a caveat worth keeping. A 2025 meta-analysis of 24 trials covering 951 older adults diagnosed with age-related muscle loss found that resistance training reliably improved grip strength, walking speed and leg strength, though the grip and walking gains were often too small to notice day to day. Muscle mass barely budged. Function moved. That gap is the tell: what improves fastest is what the body can do, not how it measures on a tape.

The twins in that photograph were running identical software. One of them just spent three decades making slightly different choices on ordinary afternoons: a hat, a decent night, a walk instead of a fourth espresso and a late finish. Small stuff, repeated for thirty years, is apparently the whole trick.