An illustrative picture: Leighton Meester at 17 (left) and 40 (right).
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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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.
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.