Do Your Ears and Nose Really Keep Growing? What the Measurements Show

Written by the Nuvirox Research Team

Short answer: your ears genuinely get bigger, your nose probably just looks like it does, and neither is growth in the sense a child grows. This is one of those observations that sounds like folk wisdom and turns out to have a small, specific literature behind it. Ears have been measured across large samples and they reliably enlarge across adult life. What the measurements do not show is new tissue being built. The structures that change are made of cartilage, and cartilage does something quite different with time than bone does.

How much bigger do ears actually get?

The most-cited figure comes from a British general practitioner who measured the left ear of 206 patients aged 30 to 93 and reported an average elongation of roughly 0.22 millimetres per year. It was a small, descriptive study published as a short piece in the BMJ, and it offered no mechanism — but the observation has held up in larger work since.

Extrapolate that rate and it comes to about 13 millimetres over six decades: roughly half an inch of extra ear between thirty and ninety. That is small enough to be invisible year to year and large enough to be obvious in old photographs, which is exactly the pattern most people report noticing.

A separate cross-sectional study comparing 100 younger and older individuals found the strongest age correlation was with ear circumference rather than length, at about 0.51 millimetres per year, with a linear regression relating circumference to age directly. Different measurement, different number, same direction.

If it is not growth, what is it?

The most convincing mechanistic work is a 2001 Laryngoscope study that combined anthropometry in nearly two thousand people with electron microscopy of auricular cartilage from a smaller sample. Ear dimensions rose significantly with age, as expected. The interesting part was the tissue: elastic fibres that were uniform in diameter in younger cartilage became irregular and degraded in older cartilage.

Elastic fibres are what let cartilage hold its shape and spring back. As they degrade, the structure loses its resistance to the loads placed on it — including its own weight, hanging off the side of the head for seventy years. The authors concluded that these structural changes in elastic fibres may be one of the causes of auricular expansion after adulthood. That is a stretching-and-sagging story, not a proliferation story.

There is a second contributor that has nothing to do with cartilage at all. The earlobe contains no cartilage — it is skin and a mass of subcutaneous fat. As dermal collagen declines and skin loses elasticity, the lobe elongates independently of anything happening above it. This is the same process behind a lot of what people notice about ageing skin generally, which we have covered in our piece on dermal thinning.

What about the nose?

Here the evidence gets noticeably thinner, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than letting the ear finding carry the nose along with it. The cross-sectional study that measured both ears and noses in the same participants found that, with one exception, the anatomical variables of the ear correlated more strongly with age than the anatomical variables of the nose did.

That is a meaningful negative result. The nose is also largely cartilaginous and would be expected to behave similarly, and the study was set up specifically to test whether it did. The honest summary is that nasal enlargement with age is plausible on mechanistic grounds, commonly asserted, and less well demonstrated than the ear finding.

There is a competing explanation for why noses look larger that does not require the nose to change at all. The facial skeleton and the fat compartments around it recede and redistribute with age. A nose that stays the same size on a face that loses volume around it will look more prominent — the same optical logic that makes veins on the back of the hand appear over time. We take that idea further in our look at what happens to the facial frame underneath the skin.

Where the theories run out

A hypothesis published more recently proposes that facial fat redistribution actively stretches the ear downward — the auricle is anchored to the skull and to the deep fascia of the lateral face, so changes in the tissue below it could apply traction. It is a reasonable idea and it is explicitly labelled a hypothesis, which is the appropriate status for it.

What nobody has done is the study that would settle this: a long-term longitudinal design following the same ears with the same measurement protocol over decades. Almost everything we have is cross-sectional, which means it compares different people of different ages rather than tracking individuals. Cross-sectional designs are vulnerable to cohort effects — differences between generations in nutrition, sun exposure or body size that have nothing to do with ageing itself.

So the confident claim is that older adults have larger ears than younger adults. The slightly less confident claim is that any given person's ears enlarge as they age. The evidence supports both, but only the first has been directly measured.

Frequently asked questions

Do ears keep growing forever?

The measured relationship is roughly linear across the adult range that has been studied, which extends into the nineties. There is no observed plateau in that data, though sample sizes at the extreme ages are small.

Is this why hearing aids stop fitting well?

External ear dimensions change, but the ear canal and concha are reported to be far more stable with age than the outer auricle. Fit problems more often come from soft tissue changes or from weight change than from canal geometry.

Do men's ears get bigger than women's?

The large anthropometric study found significant age-related increases in both sexes. Men have larger ears on average at every age, but the rate of change was not the striking difference.

Can anything slow this down?

Nothing has been tested. Since the leading mechanism is degradation of elastic fibres in cartilage, and no intervention has been shown to preserve those fibres in humans, there is no evidence-based answer here — which is more honest than the alternative.

Are big ears actually linked to longevity?

That belief exists in several cultures and was one of the stated motivations for at least one of these studies. What the data show is that ear size predicts age, not lifespan. Older people have bigger ears because they are older.

From Nuvirox

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The bottom line

Ears enlarge with age at a rate of roughly a fifth of a millimetre a year, and the best available mechanism is that elastic fibres in cartilage degrade and the structure gradually gives way under its own weight. The nose almost certainly participates in some version of the same process, but the one study that measured both found the nose correlated with age noticeably less well. It is a small, strange, well-documented corner of the ageing literature, and the honest version is more interesting than the folk version.

References

1. Heathcote JA. Why do old men have big ears? BMJ. 1995;311(7021):1668.
2. Ito I, Imada M, Ikeda M, et al. A morphological study of age changes in adult human auricular cartilage with special emphasis on elastic fibers. Laryngoscope. 2001;111(5):881-6. PMID: 11359170.
3. Ear size as a predictor of chronological age. Arch Gerontol Geriatr. PMID: 18653105.
4. Farkas LG, Posnick JC, Hreczko TM. Anthropometric growth study of the ear. Cleft Palate Craniofac J. 1992;29(4):324-9.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice.