A new study has revealed that even though women face greying of hair and gain wrinkles, and lose the shine of their hair as they grow older, they can get away by cutting many years off their age if they have fuller and firmer lips.

The international study was carried out across seven major universities and discovered that women with "yummy" lips tend to look much younger than they actually are.

"When we identified people who looked young for their age, we were struck by the difference in their lip. It is a feature that is strongly genetically determined and relatively easy to measure", said David Gunn, a scientist at Unilever and coordinator of the study.

With the study, the ages old speculation that a pout is one of the strongest signals of sexual allure has been reaffirmed.

For the sake of study, researchers analyzed the faces of as many as 102 pairs of Dutch female twins, between the ages of 59-81, and as many as 162 British women aged between 45-75.

Details of the study have been published in PLoS One journal.