An illustrative picture: Leighton Meester at 17 (left) and 40 (right).
Medicine has advanced
Smoking has decreased. Millennials aren’t at the point where medical advances matter that much to them as a demographic.
And medicine isn’t why famous boomers look good for their age, that’s called plastic surgery.
That’s what I meant by medicine :)
Those bangs are criminal.
Millennials were teenagers during peak cigarette campaigns but before vapes were readily available.
I look like shit but I did some very heavy drinking for a very long time. Finally on the back side of that. Hopefully in a few months I’ll be better off
Nobody smokes anymore.
That’s really what it is. Smoking ages you hard
It seems nicotine is far worse than mj in that regard, at least in my experience.
It ages the people around you too. That’s a big part of what’s changed.
I guarantee its the ban on indoor smoking.
That one roasted even the non smokers. It was unavoidable for poor genx
So, my dad smoked three packs a day for years and pretty much all of them in the same room. I’d spend hours in that room. People say you can’t get addicted from second hand smoke but fuck did I have cravings when he died (of cancer. I know. Shocking). Was that addiction? Who’s to say. It could be that and the grief and everything, it was a tangled fucking mess obviously, when your dad dies when you’re just 16. But hey, at least I never picked up the habit myself. Grossed out by it. I’ve seen what that shit does to a person. I’m not doing that to myself or the people around me.
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
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.
I see a ton of peeps already said sun screen so ima switch my answer and go with could be from our generation was the first gen that wasnt forced to destroy our bodies having kids and wives by 20 years old. You dont destry your body the moment you graduate or become an adult and surprise surprise you dont look like your 50 at 30 and dont have that war hardened 1000yd star cuz every kid was sooooo hopped up on koolade teachers started recommending we all get put on amphetamines before 5th grade.
The great thing about parenting is every fuckin generation is better than the last so everyone’s always got a scape goat for why we are the way we are👍👍
How does having a wife destroy your body?
Millennials smoked a lot and still do. And the more recent generations have simply moved to vapes.
So yeah, people still smoke.
They do, but nobody smokes indoors anymore.
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
deleted by creator
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.
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.
That wear sunscreen song that came out in the late 90s probably helped the cause.
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.
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.
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 saw me 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.
There’s whole fragrances based on that smell lol. People like it (i do too)
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.
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.
Sunscreen and hydrating does a lot i think.
Not being around smokers and other pollution does a ton too.
Catalytic converters are way nicer than you’d expect.
Old cars are stinky.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It stopped at millenials though. God damn 5g or wifi or something made gen z and alpha age like milk.
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.
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
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
I appreciate you responding with some logic
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.
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.
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.
Every generation looks younger than the generations before it.
Gen z looks like my parents. So I don’t agree.
Sorry, “at the same age” was implied but not specifically mentioned.
