An illustrative picture: Leighton Meester at 17 (left) and 40 (right).
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
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
88 points (81.9% liked)
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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.
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.
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.
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I guarantee its the ban on indoor smoking.
That one roasted even the non smokers. It was unavoidable for poor genx
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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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