Written by the Nuvirox Research Team
Key Points
- Nasolabial folds deepen with age due to a combination of midface fat pad descent, thinning collagen-dependent skin, and bone remodeling in the maxilla — not any single cause.
- A 2025 quantitative imaging study found fold depth correlates strongly with age and, past age 56, shifts toward being more pronounced in women, tracking hormonal midface changes.
- Fold prominence in your 20s is mostly about underlying bone structure; in your 40s and beyond, fat and skin changes take over as the dominant driver.
Short answer: it's a three-layer problem — fat, skin, and bone all move against you at once. The nasolabial fold (the crease running from the side of the nose to the corner of the mouth) deepens with age because the fat pads that once cushioned and supported the area lose volume and descend, the skin covering it loses collagen-dependent structure and elasticity, and the underlying facial bone remodels in ways that remove skeletal support. None of these alone fully explains it — it's the combination.
What Role Does Facial Fat Play?
The midface contains several distinct fat compartments — the nasolabial fat pad, the medial and deep medial cheek fat pads — that sit like cushions over the bone and provide the smooth, full contour associated with a youthful midface. With age, these compartments lose volume and, in some cases, migrate downward under gravity (a process called ptosis). As the medial cheek volume drops, the tissue directly above the nasolabial fold loses its support and drapes downward, deepening the crease.
What About Skin and Bone?
Quantitative Assessment of Nasolabial Fold Characteristics Across Age Groups. Aesthetic Surgery Journal Open Forum. 2025. PMC12322485. confirms what dermatology has long observed: progressive loss of dermal collagen and reduced skin thickness contribute directly to fold deepening, on top of the fat and bone changes. The maxilla — the bone that forms the mid-face and area around the nose — also undergoes resorption with age, particularly around the pyriform (nasal) opening, removing some of the skeletal scaffolding the overlying soft tissue relied on. The same 2025 study found an interesting wrinkle: in people in their 20s, nasolabial fold prominence tracks mainly with bone structure, not aging — some young people naturally have more visible folds for skeletal reasons alone. It's only with advancing age that fat and skin changes become the dominant driver.
Illustrative summary of the multifactorial mechanism described in facial-aging literature.
What the Research Actually Shows
Quantitative Assessment of Nasolabial Fold Characteristics Across Age Groups used objective, quantitative imaging (rather than subjective grading scales) across age groups and found strong correlations between age and multiple fold parameters — depth, width, area, and color contrast — and reported that the depth pattern shifted to be more pronounced in women specifically around age 56, coinciding with the menopausal transition and its effect on skin collagen.
Nasolabial Fold Assessment, Strategy, and Treatment with Hyaluronic Acid Fillers in Chinese Patients reinforces the multifactorial view from a clinical treatment perspective, describing how bone resorption, zygomatic ligament laxity, and fat pad descent all combine, which is why single-mechanism treatments (filler alone, for example) often produce incomplete results.
The honest counterweight: there's no clinical trial testing oral collagen supplementation specifically against nasolabial fold depth. The skin-collagen piece of this mechanism is well-established, but fat pad volume and bone resorption — two of the three drivers — are structural changes that oral supplementation has no established mechanism to reverse.
| Layer | What Changes With Age | Best-Evidenced Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Fat | Midface fat pads lose volume and descend | Filler or autologous fat grafting |
| Skin | Dermal collagen and thickness decline | Sun protection; collagen-stimulating in-office treatments |
| Bone | Maxillary bone resorbs near the nose | Structural volume restoration (filler/grafting can indirectly compensate) |
What Won't Reverse This
Because bone remodeling and fat pad volume loss are structural, no topical or oral product can fully reverse a deep, established nasolabial fold. Clinically, volume restoration (fillers or fat grafting) addresses the fat-loss component directly, which is why it tends to outperform skin-only approaches for moderate-to-deep folds. Thread-lifting procedures combined with neuromodulator injections have also shown promise in recent comparative studies for addressing the muscular-pull component of fold formation, though longer-term durability data (12–24 months) is still limited.
What Actually Helps, By Mechanism
Because three separate structures are involved, interventions map to specific layers: sun protection and smoking cessation slow the skin-collagen component; maintaining stable body weight avoids compounding fat pad loss from weight cycling; and for established, bothersome folds, dermatologist-administered volume restoration targets the fat and support-structure component directly. None of these is a substitute for the others — they address different layers of the same problem. It's worth setting expectations accordingly: someone whose fold is driven mostly by bone structure at a young age will see little benefit from lifestyle changes aimed at slowing collagen loss, while someone whose fold deepened primarily through midlife fat loss may see meaningful change from volume restoration alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do nasolabial folds mean I'm aging faster than normal?
Not necessarily — fold prominence varies a lot based on baseline bone structure and ethnicity, independent of how fast someone is otherwise aging.
Does weight loss make nasolabial folds worse?
It can, especially rapid or repeated weight loss, because it removes midface fat volume that was providing support, similar to the mechanism behind facial changes some people report with GLP-1 medications.
Is filler the only real fix?
For moderate-to-deep folds, volume restoration (filler or fat grafting) has the strongest evidence because it directly addresses the fat-loss component; skincare and lifestyle changes mainly slow further progression rather than reversing existing depth.
Why do some people in their 20s already have visible nasolabial folds?
In younger people, fold prominence is mostly explained by underlying bone structure — specifically how much the midface bone sits forward or recessed — rather than by aging-related fat or collagen loss.
Does smiling a lot cause deeper nasolabial folds?
Repetitive muscular activity from smiling and talking is one of the contributing mechanical factors identified in facial-aging research, though it works alongside — not instead of — the fat, skin, and bone changes described above.
From Nuvirox
Why We Formulated Collagen+ Complex
We formulated Collagen+ Complex around a simple idea: give the body well-studied building blocks and cofactors instead of collagen alone, since collagen synthesis is a cofactor-dependent process, not a single-ingredient one. The skin-thinning piece of midface aging is a collagen-dependent process, which is one reason we built the formula around ingredients and cofactors studied alongside that pathway, alongside our standard formula philosophy.
We back it with a 60-day money-back guarantee — long enough to actually evaluate it the way the research above suggests you should, rather than judging it after a week.
Learn more about Collagen+ Complex →The Bottom Line
Nasolabial fold deepening is a fat-plus-skin-plus-bone story, and the relative contribution of each shifts as you age — bone structure matters most in your 20s, fat and skin take over later. There's no supplement that reverses the structural components, but a fair reading of the evidence supports addressing what you can control (sun exposure, weight stability) while being realistic about what needs clinical intervention. See our guide on why skin loses elasticity with age for more on the skin-collagen piece of facial aging.
Related reading: Why Do Temples Hollow Out As You Age?
References
- Quantitative Assessment of Nasolabial Fold Characteristics Across Age Groups. Aesthetic Surgery Journal Open Forum. 2025. PMC12322485.
- Nasolabial Fold Assessment, Strategy, and Treatment with Hyaluronic Acid Fillers in Chinese Patients. PMC12113924.
- Correction of Nasolabial Folds Using Polydioxanone Cog Threads Combined With Botulinum Toxin Type A: prospective comparative clinical study. Cureus. 2026.
*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.