Looking your age isn’t necessarily about vanity, it can be a sign of good health. By contrast, scientists are increasingly finding that looking older than your biological age suggests a higher risk of heart disease and other health problems.

Danish researchers recently examined whether heavy smoking and drinking makes you look older.

Why bother? After all, we know such excesses are clearly harmful. But researchers believe identifying visible age-related signs provides predictive value, perhaps indicating a need for medical intervention or allowing an estimate of a drinker or smoker’s lifespan.

Researchers looked at 11,500 Danes, from 21 to 93 years old, for an average of 12 years. They quizzed everyone on their drinking and smoking habits, then examined whether the smokers and drinkers among them had or developed any of four common signs of aging.

Those include earlobe creases, which studies have associated with cardiovascular disease; yellowish bumps of plaque on or around the eyelids, associated with heart disease and severe plaque in blood vessels; white or gray opaque rings in the corneal margin of the eyes, of which there is no consensus as to their link to poor health; and male pattern baldness, which some studies link to coronary heart disease.

The study found heavy drinking and smoking were, indeed, associated with all but one of these aging markers. Moderate drinkers and smokers, by comparison, displayed no more signs of visual aging than those Danes who abstained.

So, which of the four telltale signals of aging was not associated with either of these habits?

Well, smoking and drinking won’t help your heart, but they apparently won’t make you bald.