When it comes to cigarettes, alcohol, and junk food, the focus is often on the impact on health, but not necessarily how it will affect appearance in the long term. Besides staining your teeth from red wine or smoke, or putting on a few pounds from excess carbs, how bad can it possibly make us look?
Pretty bad, according to 42-year-old freelance journalist Anna Magee. She was guest-editing a magazine called Expert Beauty when a surgeon named Charles Nduka commissioned a piece on smoking. He put Magee in touch with Auriole Prince, a forensic artist who creates digital images of what people will look like over time based on their lifestyles. While Magee herself has noticed small signs of aging and has received cheek fillers and Botox injections, she wondered what she’d look like 10 years from now given different lifestyle factors.
Prince created three projected images of Magee showing her face one decade from now after smoking a pack a day, drinking two glasses of wine a day, and indulging in sugar, cakes, junk food and refined carbs. Magee posted them on her blog. The results are jarring, but she insists her project was not merely a scare tactic.
“My hope is simply that people will see what a huge difference lifestyle can make to the way you look,’ Magee told us. “Warnings about lung cancer and heart disease, though real, are not as confronting and immediate as such images, and if anyone out there is as vain as I am, something like this, I imagine, would be more powerful at prompting a bit of a lifestyle rethink than any stats or docs' warnings. I am a health writer and really loathe wrist-slapping stories so am always looking for surprising and novel angles and ways of reporting health.”
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