An illustrative picture: Leighton Meester at 17 (left) and 40 (right).
Are you in that age group? Your age group tends to look younger than expected, younger groups look like perpetual babies, and older generations look like perpetual adults/old timers. Always been a thing. Do you remember being 10 and thinking your 18 year old cousin was a full grown adult? When you’re even just 25, you might think your other 18 year old cousin looks like a baby.
It’s not just bodily appearance, it’s their style. If I saw a 40 year old man with a combover and sideburns while wearing a short sleeve button down, I’d say they owned a house in 1976 on a used car salesman’s salary. I’d have to cognitively recognize that even a 20 year old in 1976 would be 70 now. If I saw a 60 year old in an Arctic Monkeys shirt and cargo pants, I’d probably gauge them to have been a teen with an ipod. In reality, they’d have been 35 when the ipod was first released. There’s so many cues we use to evaluate a person. Hair, makeup, clothing, accent, vernacular, interests, activities… Plus, it’s not just association of trends to their calendar years, but association of trends to your age. The fang bangs pictured are more recently trending, but if you’re ~35-45 now and she currently had whatever that post-goth emo fringe sideswipe blond/black fade style is called, you’d probably still take 10-15 years off your estimate. Meanwhile, take someone like Amy Winehouse. What do you gauge her age to be? Beehive hair, winged eyeliner, vintage sound. Not gonna /spoiler tag but she died when she was twenty seven.
Also, cosmetic care continues to improve. Better science, more money to throw at it, better care along the way, and confirmation bias of those with good surgeries.
Every generation looks younger than the generations before it.
In addition to the smoking and decrease in alcohol consumption, I also think a ton of people are underestimating just how brutal the sun is on your skin and how much pushback there was against sun screen. It was viewed as a military product and the attitude from the 40s up until the 90s or so was basically that the more tan, the better.
A huge amount of people refused to use sunscreen, pretty much ever, until the late 80s/early 90s and then they’d go out and roast themselves.
I’m a young-ish looking millennial who refuses to use sunscreen because of how it feels, smells, and requires rinsing off later.The secret is never going outside during the day.
I hate sunscreen, I just cover myself all the time. Even when the heat is unbearable. I look like an idiot with the neck flap on my hat but at least I’m not getting burnt.
I just watched Ghostbusters for the first time since I was a kid. Those dudes were like 30 ish. They looked like they were 45-50. I’m like 8 years older than most of them were at the time, and not to blow my own horn, but I think I and my friends look far better than they did at that age.
Those dudes were like 30 ish.
When the movie came out in 1984 they were 30ish to 40.
Harold Ramis was about 40 (1944)
Ernie Hudson was about 39 (1945)
Bill Murray was about 34 (1950)
Dan Akroyd was about 32 (1952)
They looked like they were 45-50
Yeah, they definitely all looked about a decade older than they were.
GenX - I think I look my age but when I tell people my age at work they look so surprised. So to some extent I think people just think, say, 50, looks older than it does. It’s true I don’t look like my mom did at this age (and she wasn’t a smoker) skincare and sunscreen do work. And I work out more. Like the lady in the images, I did look about 25 at 15 but then looked like that for a long time.
As someone else here said though - if you are looking at celebrities, in general they have also had work done, and Botox, the lady in the picture looks botoxed for sure.
If you go farther back, most people had harder lives. My maternal grandmother aged faster because her husband beat her; her mom was in the Great Depression, and so on. We complain now because we see how good it could be but it’s still better than the past was.
Yeah; most people for years thought I was a millennial if they were meeting me for the first time. I put it down to good diet, exercise, and not exposing my skin to the sun more than necessary (something that got me teased when young and everyone was trying to tan).
People in previous generations didn’t tend to have a choice; they were exposed to smoke and sunlight as a matter of course.
obligatory, since nobody else has linked it yet
This 👆
Nobody smokes anymore.
I guarantee its the ban on indoor smoking.
That one roasted even the non smokers. It was unavoidable for poor genx
I watched a documentary last night about an event that occurred in the 80s. They would give the age of the individual along with the name. In every single case the person looked about 10 years older than I am. Not just the hairstyle but the actual age showing on their face.
I am at least 4 years older than every single person mentioned at the time they were pictured.
About half the people pictured died as a result of this incident. So it’s not like it was a picture from years later.
Smoking and sun exposure are motherfuckers for aging
Millennials smoked a lot and still do. And the more recent generations have simply moved to vapes.
So yeah, people still smoke.
Elder millennials are the last to remember what smoking actually was. We remember restaurants with smoking and non-smoking sections. We remember a time before the “smoke break”, when you didn’t leave your desk to smoke, you just lit up and continued to work.
Millennials smoke in designated outdoor smoking areas. Boomers smoked in grocery stores.
I’m GenX and I remember smoking in grocery stores, movie theatres, offices, buses, airplanes…everywhere. People used to smoke while eating.
I knew people who’d smoke 2 packs a day, and one guy who’d smoke 3 (basically a cigarette in his hand every minute of the day, sometimes with a second one burning in the ashtray). Having a puff while you’re out drinking doesn’t even count as smoking in comparison.
I think you for the wrong generation. Or you live somewhere not where in from
You got numbers or just feelings?
They likely smoke and assume they’re the norm.
Gen Z/A is going to look even more youthful with their lower alcohol consumption.
Gen Z/A are heavily addicted to vaping, which is a little better than smoking, but only a little.
Not with the addiction of social media. Stress and anxiety are bad for your health.
Mate are you implying Millenials aren’t stressed?
We are, but z and alpha have literally grown up with an iPad in their face. They are probably more addicted to social media which is known to fuck with your dopamine levels.
I smoke and people still think I’m 10 years younger than I am. 🤷
How long you been smoking for?
My MIL looks 20 years older than she actually is, but I saw photos of her from 30 years ago and she looked pretty normal
Seems to hit as you get older, and obviously self a on quantity smoked
Except for a 3 year period where I quit, 23 years.
That’s really what it is. Smoking ages you hard
It ages the people around you too. That’s a big part of what’s changed.
If there’s any trend that way, in the general population, it’s because of increased sunscreen use and decreased cigarette use. But, like, I don’t know if you’d look at a 40 year old farm worker and think they look young?
Everybody from a more recent generation looks on average younger than the generations before. In the middle ages people didn’t have sunscreen and bathed once a year. But even if you look at older movies, Sean Connery is 31 in Dr No but he looks like in his 40s. All those cigarettes, the booze, the lack of regular exercise, and only eating full Scottish breakfasts all the time. Fast forward to today where more people worry about their appearance and next to not smoking, not drinking, eating healthy, exercising, etc. people have a range of cosmetics and/or cosmetic surgery at their disposal. Of course they look younger.
Medieval people bathed all the dang time
It stopped at millenials though. God damn 5g or wifi or something made gen z and alpha age like milk.
Nah, Gen Z’s thing is mostly fashion sense because they’re essentially cultural archeologists in a lot of respects. Gen Z does make new stuff, but a lot of what they do is also remixing old stuff and dusting it off and trying it out again too. And some of that shows in their fashion sense where they’re often mixing stuff that makes them look like my Dad with stuff that makes them look like my Grandpa.
It’s sort of like how names like Gertrude and Agatha and stuff are starting to make a come back. A lot of the younger crowds never met those old people and got the associated “that’s an old person name” cultural alignment. To them, it’s just a nice sounding string of syllables.
Fashion is cyclical. Every generation does this
Aged people from those generations don’t exist. You know, because of how age works… it’s the difference between the birth year and the current year. No gen z is over 30. No gen alpha is an adult. I am disturbed this needs to be pointed out.
In the middle ages people didn’t have sunscreen
in the middle ages people didn’t need sunscreen. sunscreen is only needed today (mostly for people in america) because some english people from north england (55°N) thought it was a good idea to move to america, as far south as california (30°N), where it’s sunny all the time and the sun burns at twice the intensity. Of course suddenly these pale-ass people suddenly develop sunburns all around.
I have no idea who she is. She looks like she’s in her 20s on the left and 35-40 on the right to me. I’m in my mid 40s.
No, but they look older than their age when they’re <20
Yep lol she looks 30 in both photos.
I’m a baby/tail end millennial and I’ve been assumed to be in my mid 20s for the past 15 years ¯\(ツ)/¯
Millennials are killing the wrinkling industry
There’s probably some survivorship bias going on here. You’re not really going to see pictures of people who have been unattractive their whole lives, I wouldn’t think.
No, there’s just more Botox …
Plastic surgery has gotten better if you’re really only looking at celebrities. I know plenty of non-celebrity millennials that have aged like fine raw milk in a hot sun.
That buccal fat removal trend is going to age like milk though.
Also millennials use sunscreen.
Of course we do. There was that bizarre song in 97 that made sure we never forget to wear sunscreen!
Somehow Baz Luhrmann has done more for humanity than most boomers.
Sunscreen and hydrating does a lot i think.
Not being around smokers and other pollution does a ton too.
Absolutely. I’ve been using moisturizer for about the past 30 years and - if i may say so myself - I look a lot less crinkly than many other people my age.
