Advanced paternal age is associated with lower facial attractiveness

In view of disease risk, Kong et al. (2012) demonstrated that most of the new mutations are explained by the age of the father at conception. Accordingly, paternal age effects have been found for a variety of offspring traits, from physical and mental health to intelligence. Here, we investigated whether facial attractiveness is significantly associated with paternal age. We used the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (n = 4018 male and 4416 female high school graduates) to analyze the association between an individual's father's age at birth and that individual's facial attractiveness (estimated by rating the high school yearbook photographs from 1957), controlling for sex, age as well as mother's age. We find that subject's facial attractiveness decreased with advancing paternal but not maternal age, suggesting that facial attractiveness might be a cue of an individual's new mutation load.