An illustrative picture: Leighton Meester at 17 (left) and 40 (right).
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 weirdo who likes the smell of sunscreen so I use it all summer long when I’m going outside. I’m 31 but when I shave my beard off people think I’m barely 20.
You LIKE the smell‽
I’m closer to be 40, and I despise putting it on, but I still do every day it’s sunny.
About your look: do you have kids? People think I’m 30, maybe because I don’t have any, so I’ve been able to sleep every night.
No kids!
My theory still stands!
People think I’m in my late 20s. I’m in my 40s. So add another no kids to the pile of proof that kids age you because I have none. I sleep everyday until I wake up, I protect my skin from the sun, I don’t drink or smoke.
I have a funny experience with kids and people guessing my age. I had one set in my early 20s, and another set in my late 30s. People who knew me from my first kids thought I was the age I am, people who sawe with my second kids thought I was much younger than I am, and people who saw me with all of them thought I was older than I am because they thought I was the grandma. Except occasionally my oldest complained, she said people thought we were a lesbian couple with kids, that people thought she was a lot older than she was.
Which taught me, people don’t really look at you much, they make assumptions based on your situation, and that colors how they see you.
My friend says sunscreen causes cancer and refuses to wear it. Yeah hes not intelligent. Also loves llms so … Take it for what you will.
There are sunscreens with oxybenzone that have been linked to various health issues (namely hormone disruption iirc), so your friend isn’t entirely off the mark.
However there are plenty of mineral sunscreens that use zinc or titanium oxides (literally rocks), and those are perfectly safe as far as science can tell.
Oh i know its a partial truth, but its a dumb take IMO. Pretty sure he got it from RFK jr. They love to spout half truths that seem legit while undermining real health.
There’s one brand from China that caused cancer once, so Nivea and Neutrogena are obviously out of the question.
That wear sunscreen song that came out in the late 90s probably helped the cause.
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.
Or cancer. It only takes getting a chunk cut out of your back because the biopsy didn’t have clean edges to make you take sun protection seriously.
have you tried different kinds of sunscreen? The stuff i use is just an oil (well, it’s oily at least) that you spray on and rub in, it says nothing about needing to be rinsed off and i’ve never felt a need to do so, and it doesn’t really have a smell nor does it feel any weirder than being slightly sweaty.
Nah my face easily gets pimples if I rub anything harsher than water on it. Even specially formulated cleansers messes with whatever carefully balanced chemistry I have going on there.
A hat helps too, every inch of hat brim helps.
I was allergic to every sunscreen on the market from when I was 12 and got a bad allergic reaction to one (face swelled, such a rash) but then the mineral ones eventually got better (that’s what I mostly use) and the Korean ones got available here (those are amazing, gentle and effective) so for the last 30 years I have been able to screen and my skin is good enough people comment & ask for my routine. In my early 20s, like you, there was a period I could only use water, or a little pure jojoba.
So I think to some extent you can recover it. Retin-A and sunblock every day.
There are pictures that have gone around recently of people who show the effects of a lifetime of sun vs skin care. One is a trucker who spent decades in a truck with the window down. His left arm and the left side of his face look slightly melted compared with the right. Another is a lady who only motioned her face for decades. She has a very young for her age looking face but her neck and shoulders look like a Galapagos tortoise.
obligatory, since nobody else has linked it yet
This 👆
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.
I know im old and I refuse to color my hair which has become common practice even in men so I look older now. Its kinda funny because I was always a long hair so until about my 50’s it often seemed like people thought I was younger than I was just do to the long hair and casual clothes.
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.
People are usually surprised when I tell them I am 41 and say they thought I was in my 20s.
You know, it depends. I went into a bar and the female bartender carded me. I would have gauged her at 50+. She was amazed I was three years older than her.
She was 38.
And on dating sites, I see women who at least claim to be a couple of years younger than me, but definitely look mid-fifties, some I get like, “you look like you could pass as my mom” vibes.
One, generational terms like millenial are BS, grouping people by imaginary immutable characteristics in a manner similar to racism. Age +or- 10 years doesn’t tell you anything.
Two, this is innately an unworkable hypothesis/example. Someone like Meester cannot be a way of judging normal conditions. She started as pretty healthy and attractive, then went into an industry that motivated her to prioritize her health and appearance, and was lucky enough to be rewarded well enough to fund further investments into her health and appearance. That experience is absolutely not going to be representative.
If you don’t look at public figures in that kind of industry you also then have almost nothing on which to base the question. You don’t get to look at most people’s age and compare it to their appearance so you can’t develop a sense of whether it might be true or not.
generational terms like millenial are BS, grouping people by imaginary immutable characteristics in a manner similar to racism.
It’s absolutely valid to analyze generational cohorts for statistical differences and similarities. We want to know these things for public health whether we’re talking about disease (age-adjusted rates of cancer, obesity, etc.) or other health outcomes (car accidents, homicides) or even broad social statistics (smoking rates, marriage rates, divorce rates, living arrangements, migration patterns), economic statistics (income, wealth, unemployment), and even soft statistics like preferences (fashion, taste in television/movies, consumer behavior, etc.). These indicators can often raise clues that something is worth looking into, and whether there is an epidemiological, sociological, or economic trend that requires a response.
So yeah, I think it’s fine to talk about generational differences, especially in age adjusted terms.
Folks that act like there’s no difference in generations are bizarre to me. No, there’s no solid line to draw and drop people into buckets, but as you said there’s plenty of valid analysis.
For example, I’ve spoken before about how kids are growing up more slowly than Gen X did. There are valid reasons for that and it’s interesting to me. This trend doesn’t say much as to being positive or negative, but it certainly exists.
We do
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.
Your age group tends to look younger than expected, younger groups look like perpetual babies, and older generations look like perpetual adults/old timers.
I think plenty of Gen Z kids look really old for their age. For celebrities, Sabrina Carpenter and Millie Bobby Brown look older than I think most Millennial celebrities did at the same age.
And with regular people who I work with, the twenty-somethings don’t look that young to me. Fashion and style might be part of it, but even skin and hair and overall appearance seem older to me than many millennials I know. Maybe it’s rates of smoking/vaping, maybe it’s other substances, maybe it’s sleep or sunlight or obesity.
But my unscientific observation is that I think people born around 1990 have always appeared younger, longer.
Every generation looks younger than the generations before it.
Gen z looks like my parents. So I don’t agree.
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.
i mean, there’s a whole thing where movies insist on basically every single actor being conventionally attractive these days.
It’s something that stood out to me about Project Hail Mary, the government lady is violently german looking and that’s fucking rare to see in big movies these days
No.
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?
Even golfers (male) look older than they should to me.
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.
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. I am disturbed this needs to be pointed out.
You can literally google “gen z aged like milk” it’s been a meme for years, I didn’t make this shit up
Ok, I googled that, and I lost a few precious minutes of my life, and I found out that this is something that there are some trash articles written about, all just echoing that people online say this or search for this, but it doesn’t really mean anything or has any basis in reality. Thanks.
Some say they fear their generation is aging more quickly than others. But as Gen Z-ers enter their late 20s, it’s more likely that they are simply getting older.
Wow!
Brother, I was hoping people could see it was a joke comment if I started it off with 5g and wifi giving people health issues
Lemmy doesn’t do subtle jokes. 🙄
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.
sun exposure is like half the reason behind the stereotypical “old person” appearance, with excessive wrinkles and saggy skin. Go look at someone who spends time sunbathing, they start looking like a leather couch.
Medieval people bathed all the dang time
Many misunderstand that period of time, they were highly hygienic (for their understanding of such things) they washed their hands before eating, they used shared food containers very hygienically (no double dip, no using something that was already in your mouth to serve the next food, no scratching your face at the table with your hand, etc). People also think most were dead by 30ish, many lived til their 70s and 80s but so many more didn’t make it out of childhood that keeps the average age down. There is a great yt chan where the host talks about all this and much more, can’t remember his chan atm but if there is interest I can track it down and link it.
