A New 2026 Review Puts Numbers on Facial Bone Aging

A fresh review in JPRAS Open quantifies exactly how much the facial skeleton changes, and where.

We've written before about the research trail showing that the facial skeleton remodels with age, not just the skin above it. This year, that body of research got a significant new entry: a 2026 review published in JPRAS Open that pulled together the growing imaging literature and put hard numbers on how much the facial bones actually change over a lifetime.

The Numbers

Dr. Kyu-Ho Yi and colleagues synthesized imaging studies to quantify three specific structural shifts in the aging face:

Source: Dr. Kyu-Ho Yi et al., JPRAS Open, 2026

What Each of These Actually Means

These aren't abstract measurements. Each one corresponds to something people actually notice in the mirror. As the orbital opening enlarges, the eye socket effectively widens, which is part of why hollowing around the eyes becomes more pronounced with age, independent of anything happening in the skin itself. As maxillary height decreases, the midface loses some of the bony support that gives cheeks their fullness, contributing to a flatter, less defined look. And as the mandibular angle increases, the jawline softens and loses some of its original contour.

None of this happens overnight, and it isn't the only factor in how a face changes with age. But it's a measurable, quantified piece of the picture that's easy to overlook when every aging narrative is framed around skin alone.

Part of a Larger Pattern

What makes this review notable isn't that it's a single surprising finding. It's that it confirms and quantifies what close to a decade of earlier research, across multiple imaging methods and research groups, had already been pointing toward. If you want the fuller history of that research trail, from 2018 through 2024, we've laid it out in a separate post.

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