An illustrative picture: Leighton Meester at 17 (left) and 40 (right).
Those bangs are criminal.
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 :)
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.
deleted by creator
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
People are usually surprised when I tell them I am 41 and say they thought I was in my 20s.
I get this a lot, too.
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.
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.
Nobody smokes anymore.
Also less working outside and the wide spread use of water resistant sunscreen from the 1980s on. Not smoking and staying out of the sun will keep your skin looking better for longer.
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?
Gen Z/A is going to look even more youthful with their lower alcohol consumption.
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.
Gen Z/A are heavily addicted to vaping, which is a little better than smoking, but only a little.
I don’t think either of those things are true
Gen Z is addicted to vaping: https://www.chestnet.org/guidelines-and-topic-collections/publications/chest-advocates/gen-z-is-hooked-on-vaping Gen A is a bit young, but the older Gen As are included in the stats and follow the exact pattern as Gen Z.
As for how bad vaping is, is a bit more difficult, as it’s a more recent thing than smoking is. But indications are it’s better than smoking but it’s far from safe. This site had a good overview with sources: https://www.healthline.com/health/is-vaping-worse-than-smoking-cigarettes
Depends on what you’re vaping, I’d imagine different chemicals would vary greatly.
However nothing beats the OG vaped chemical O2 , nothing is going to beat the things our lungs are designed for.
What really bakes my noodle is that our lungs are more meant to expel CO2 than inhale O2. I even had my great doctor talking about my heart slamming because I was low on blood, therefore O2. I never argue with docs, but we don’t have oxygen sensors, only “holy shit that’s too much carbon dioxide!” sensors.
I mean biologically speaking, having to breath and eat from the same hole is pretty annoying. We need to bioengineer humanity away from this entire active respiratory system nonsense.
I’m tired of being a damn gas exchange /s
Edits: some typos
Yeah I remember thinking this was why oxygen is the most humane way to perform assisted suicides.
Always a devisive topic but for a persons body to not know it is about fall asleep and die… Just seemed a logical starting point.
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.
Left-handed cigarettes were always harsher on my lungs than the regular sort, despite the volume smoked up. Now I can’t smoke anything, can’t even take a vape hit, lungs turn off like a light switch. Now if my liver would rebel in the same manner…
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’m a bit of a Gen X counter example. I smoked for 20-years and was getting carded for beer in my 40s by young women. At 55, I was looking damned good until the last couple of years, and that’s more mental issues than physical. (I know, they go together.)
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.
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.
Gen X here. I learned to smoke in the local mega mall.
You got numbers or just feelings?
They likely smoke and assume they’re the norm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s whole fragrances based on that smell lol. People like it (i do too)
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.
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 daysNow I can’t unsee it.
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.
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.
Gen z looks rough.
