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Kathy Gao

It’s amazing what protests and a long-running political deadlock can do for you. According to a viral Microsoft app that guesses a person’s age just by a photo, Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying’s rocky tenure in office has seen him not age, but knock back 15 years.
To test the app, South China Morning Post uploaded some of the world’s most powerful leaders’ pictures, from when they took office to present day, and here’s how they fared.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s face, according to the app How-Old.net, shows how running a nation of more than 1.3 billion people with various political and social issues is not an easy task.


Xi has aged for more than 10 years since he took office, the app shows. In a photo of Xi taken in 2011, the Microsoft app puts his age at 60 while in another photo taken earlier this year, his age is 73. Xi was actually born in 1953 and is only turning 62 in June.
In a speech at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, US President Barack Obama joked about how he has aged since his presidency. But despite his graying hair, How-old.net thinks Obama looks younger than his age.
In a photo taken of Obama this year, the app gives his age as 47 while in fact the American president is turning 54 in August. In another picture of him which was taken in 2009, the app put Obama’s age at 41.


But Obama has a rival halfway across the world for seemingly defying age.
Despite being the most unpopular chief executive since Hong Kong’s handover in 1997 and despite the weeks-long Occupy Central pro-democracy protests last year which brought the city to a head, Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s number 1 official, has got 15 years younger since he took office, according to the app.
The app predicted the 60-year-old Leung’s age as 69 in a photo taken in 2011, one year before he was elected as chief executive of the territory.
In another photo of him taken this year, the app estimated Leung’s age as 54.

But don’t seek advice on the secret to youth from CY Leung just yet. The science behind the app is unclear, as Microsoft’s How-old.net gives no other explanation than “sorry if we didn’t quite get the age … right”.
The age-guessing app was launched by Microsoft on April 29 and has since gone viral, with millions of people sharing their pictures with the guessed age in social media.
According to Eason Wang, a senior programme manager for search engine Bing who worked on the app, How-old.net mainly relies on face detection, gender classification and age detection technologies to calculate the age of the people presented in pictures.


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Leung Chun-ying (CY Leung)

How politics ages you – unless you’re CY Leung ‘who looks 15 years younger’ despite Hong Kong unrest

Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s number 1 official, looked distinctively older when he began his term, according to an age-guessing app by Microsoft. 

Secret to youth? Hong Kong leader CY Leung's photo knocks back six years from his real age and 15 years from his estimated age when he took office.

US President Barack Obama has frequently joked that the presidency has aged him. 

But an age-guessing app has consistently stated he looks younger than he is. 

The app guessed Chinese President Xi Jinping's age as 60 when he started.

But he looks like he has aged by a decade in just three years in power, according to the app.

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