How Old Do I Look? AI Age Guesser

An age guesser that gives one number to the year hides how far off it can be, so we measured ours. The celebrity look alike on this site holds photos of public figures from Wikimedia Commons. For 577 of them we know the date of birth (from Wikidata) and the day the photo was taken (from the photo's Commons page), so we know how old each person was in the photo. We ran the age model on every one and compared.

It was off by 6.7 years on average and 5.3 at the median, with 47% of faces within 5 years and 77% within 10. Its makers report 4.54 years across their own test photos and 6.54 on Wikipedia photos, the set most like ours. Public figures are not everyone: makeup, styling and stage light change how old a face reads, so a casual selfie can read differently.

Where it leans: the model pulls ages toward the middle. Faces in their 20s read 1.7 years older on average, faces in their 40s 4.9 years younger and faces of 60 and over 3.0 years younger. The 8 faces under 20 read 15.3 years older, too few to measure the model on, which is why there is no verdict under 20. Women read 4.1 years younger on average and men about right. By where people are from, the biggest leans were public figures from South Asia, read 6.4 years younger (67 faces), and from Africa, read 3.4 years older (67 faces). A face small in the frame reads worse: faces under 120 pixels wide in our photos were off by 7.8 years on average, against 6.6 for the rest, so fill the frame.

Type your real age before the photo, or on the result after it, and the result reads it against the range. The cut-off is the range itself: 5 years either side of the best single guess, the width that held the real age of 51% of the reference faces. Inside it, your face reads about your age. A real age above the range means your face reads younger than you are; below it, older.

Among the reference faces aged 20 and over, the split was 31% younger, 52% about their age and 17% older. The model leans young on faces over 40 and on women, so a "reads younger" there is partly the model. Under 20 there is no verdict at all, only the range. Your age is never sent anywhere: it stays in the page on your device.

One photo is one reading. Two different, dated photos of the same person read 6.8 years apart at the median, after allowing for the years between them (23 people), which is more than the range is wide on either side. Read two or three photos taken the same way before you settle on younger or older.

We changed every reference photo on purpose and read it again, to see what moves the age guess. The table shows how far each change moved one read of the same photo at the median, and which way it leaned on average across all the photos.

Most changes move a single read by a couple of years in either direction, which is why the tool reads your photo and its mirror image and averages them. Two lean one way: a smoothing filter takes the fine texture away and the face reads younger, and black and white reads younger too. A smile leans the other way: across the reference photos, smiling faces read about 2.2 years older than neutral ones relative to their age.

Two things we could not measure. Glasses: no reference photo was labeled for them. Turning the head to the side: a turn cannot be made by editing a photo, and our estimate of it from the face landmarks was not reliable enough to sort the photos by. Take glasses off and face the camera.

The age guesser takes a few seconds per photo. For a reading you can compare from one month to the next:

Skin is part of what makes a face read older, not just its shape. In a study of cheek skin from 170 women and girls aged 11 to 76, the more even the skin color, the younger it was judged, and the evenness of both pigment (melanin) and redness (hemoglobin) counted (Matts and colleagues, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 2007). An earlier study put the skin color of women of different ages on the same face shapes and found the same: more even color read younger (Fink, Grammer and Matts, Evolution and Human Behavior, 2006). Both studied women.

Those signals can be measured from a photo. The AI skin analysis reads redness and tone evenness on your face, and the skin age test answers the skin side of the question. The full report measures the same skin signals from your photo, along with your face proportions, and the SkinPal app tracks them week by week.

The age guesser reads whatever face is largest in the photo, so it works for how old does she look, how old does he look and guess my age alike, with the same range and the same measured error. A photo of a screen or a print can read, but the model was measured on real photos only. To find which public figure a face is closest to, try the celebrity look alike.