Age Spots

Your result, the one DNA position behind it, and what the research says.

5/10 confidence.

About Age Spots

Solar lentigines - the flat brown marks that build up on hands, arms and shoulders with years of sun - are one of the most visible records of accumulated sun exposure. How readily they form varies between people at the same exposure. This position sits in the switch that controls telomerase, the enzyme that maintains the ends of chromosomes, and it has been linked to how many of these marks people carry on body skin. Sun exposure remains by far the larger factor.

Good to know: Sun spots record accumulated sun exposure more than they record age. The genetic difference here is small next to how much sun skin has had. They collect on the skin that has taken the most sun: the backs of the hands, the forearms, the shoulders and the face.

Fun fact: Solar lentigines are sometimes called liver spots, a name from an old and entirely mistaken belief that they had something to do with the liver.

Discovery: This promoter variant was tied to solar lentigine counts in a genome-wide study.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: TERT

Variant (rsID): rs2735940

Location: Chr 5:1,296,371

dbSNP rs2735940

The studies

Variants in the TERT Gene Increase the Occurrence of Solar Lentigines by Modifying Telomerase Expression Exclusively in the Skin (Deecke L et al., The Journal of investigative dermatology, 2024)

Other lifestyle traits

Hair Density: A change in a guidance receptor gene, linked in an East Asian study to how densely hair grows on the scalp.

Blond Hair: The pigment switch beside KITLG, the single best-known genetic driver of naturally blond hair in people of European descent.

Eye Color: The biggest genetic switch for blue against brown eyes, read together with two changes that decide the shade it lands on.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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