The Plastic Surgery Data

Download the plastic surgery data (plain text).

A facelift is a common cosmetic surgical procedure. Typically one of the goals of patients undergoing this surgery is to look younger. Some surgeons wanted to quantify just how much younger a patient might expect to look after such surgery. The surgeons took photos of 60 patients just before their surgery, and again one year later. Then for each photo, they asked 10 people to estimate the age of the person in the photo, and they averaged the 10 estimates together for a measure of the perceived age. A measure of how much younger a person looks post-surgery was calculated by taking the difference between the perceived age in the person’s before and after photos, adjusted for the year that passed between when the photos were taken. The data file agechange.txt is a plain text file of the 60 perceived age changes.

Read more about the project and the full data that were collected:

N. Chauhan, J.P. Warner, and P.A. Adamson (2012). Perceived Age Change After Aesthetic Facial Surgical Procedures: Quantifying Outcomes of Aging Face Surgery. Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery 14(4), 258-262.

Thanks to Dr. P.A. Adamson for permission to use these data.