You might think you look younger than you actually are. You might initially focus on your face and think it really doesn’t look all that bad, given the mileage–but then your eyes travel down to the neck and all pretensions vanish. The neck is the great betrayer of age, with the truth revealed in the saggy skin that makes you wonder why you haven’t started gobbling.
Why does neck skin sag? A lot of the answer has to do with basic wear and tear on your skin and the hard work put in over the years by the platysma muscles, which are the thin layer of muscles that run from your jaw down the neck to your collarbones. The California Skin Institute website has a pretty good description of what happens:
“As with all skin, factors like genetics, extreme weight loss, collagen and elastin breakdown, and sun exposure can affect how your neck ages. However, there are additional factors that can act specifically on the neck to make it look older than the rest of you.
Thin, weak and delicate skin and muscle cover the neck. Year after year, twisting, stretching, and the pull of gravity and any pockets of subcutaneous fat have a cumulative aging effect. Most people notice neck skin beginning to significantly sag and wrinkle around the age of 40. That’s also when underlying platysmal muscles start to detach and loosen, their edges showing through thinning skin as vertical bands from the chin to collarbone.”
In short, by the time you’re into your 40s and beyond, the cake is baked. When you think about it, the area directly under the chin has done a lot of work by then, fiercely resisting the direct downward pull of gravity and engineering years of vigorous nodding and head turning. By then, your platysma muscles and skin are exhausted and unable to snap back as they did when you were younger. There’s really not much you can do about it, either, other than try to avoid excessive sun and cycles of significant weight gain and loss that stretch the layer of skin out even more and put you ever more firmly into turkey neck territory.
The California Skin Institute passage quoted above says your neck may “look older than the rest of you.” I’d guess your neck would beg to differ, and might argue instead that it is the most accurate reflection of the years you’ve logged.
Webner House 