An illustrative picture: Leighton Meester at 17 (left) and 40 (right).
Nobody smokes anymore.
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.
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.
I guarantee its the ban on indoor smoking.
That one roasted even the non smokers. It was unavoidable for poor genx
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👍👍
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gen z looks rough.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
