That’s true, especially faces. I was looking at photos in my college yearbook, after returning from a reunion. And all of us looked so soft and blurred. We all have more distinctive faces now, and look more like ourselves. I hadn’t noticed it until then. But it’s really striking.
I’m envious! I hope one day my hair will look like Cinderella’s wicked stepmother’s, but so far all I’ve got is a silver splat.
Heh, I was thinking more of Elsa Lanchester.
Yeah, that’s great!
My wife went grey at least 20-25 years ago - probably before age 40. Dying had just become too expensive and had done too much damage. For many years, she was generally the only or one of very few “mature” women w/ undyed hair. To me, it seemed weird that so many women thought a dye job enhanced their looks, but to each their own.
It seems to me that over the past 5-10 years, I’ve been seeing more and more grey heads. Wouldn’t surprise me if the pandemic ccellerated the trend.
Myself, I still think of my hair as brown (used to be red). But when the clippings pile up on the floor during a cut, there sure is more grey and white than brown…
Part of what makes it sad is that most of the time these people are clearly not comfortable in their ‘young’ clothes. It’s obvious they’re wearing them because they believe it’s important to look young & trendy, not because this is a look they feel good in. It’s as much attitude as the clothes themselves. A woman wearing a corset top because she likes the fit/feel works at any age, but a woman wearing a corset top (uncomfortably) because it’s on trend looks awkward whether she’s 15 or 50.
Yes the pandemic accelerated gray hair. I saw several women who surprisingly turned gray.
I don’t know if there were significant numbers of women without gray hair who suddenly went gray during the pandemic. But there were probably many more women with dyed hair who had to, or chose to, avoid visiting hairdressers for social-distancing reasons, and just let their natural color grow out.
Yeah, you missed my point, as thorny_locust explained. I’m not denying—in fact, in the post you responded to, I explicitly acknowledged—that it’s natural for humans to find young bodies more sexually appealing than old bodies.
What I’m talking about is something different: not merely lack of sexual attraction, but feelings of outright horror and disgust at viewing the totally natural and healthy “physical markers of old age” such as gray hair and wrinkles, and thinking that those markers need to be hidden. That’s not an ineradicable human instinct; that’s a learned manifestation of culture.
In most traditional societies, for example, adults wear the same basic clothing styles and hairstyles from physical maturity until death. This holds true whether the traditional garments are full-coverage suits of fur, as among some steppe-dwelling or polar-region nomads, or a simple loincloth as in some more tropical societies.
In neither case is there a general societal expectation that younger people “ought” to be showing more skin or that older people “ought” to be showing less. Young adults in those societies don’t preferentially seek old people as marriage partners, but they also don’t think that old people need to cover up more in order to “look better”.
Yes I was saying that exact same thing, in my reply to the other poster. But the way you put it is less ambiguous.
Added — one coworker friend of mine quickly turned all gray and it surprised me because I hadn’t realized she was dying her hair.
Apparently there is such a thing as severe illness causing graying and balding, which may have affected some covid sufferers who weren’t previously gray. But yeah, I think you’re right that most of the “sudden gray” we saw during the pandemic was just the consequence of pausing or stopping normal hair-dyeing routines among the naturally gray.
One thing I find challenging about the concepts of body shaming/acceptance is that there is a vast gulf between “feelings of outright horror and disgust” and having a personal opinion that something is unattractive, or that an alternative would be more attractive.
If I were to say, for example, “That is not a good look on a person of that age.” IMO it is fine for someone to say, “I disagree with you” or “That person likely doesn’t care what you think.” I’m not as comfortable with someone responding, “You are body shaming.”
I suspect I am overthinking this and, whatever I think, should just keep my big mouth shut!
“that’s not a good look for you” feels a little more judgey to me than “other choices are more flattering”. I guess i feel like we don’t have a moral obligation to dress to please others. Perhaps I’m in the minority in that.
Years ago, people were discussing skorts at work, and some guy piped in that he didn’t think they flattered anyone. He, by his tone, clearly meant that we shouldn’t wear them. I replied, “that’s not the point. The point is that i can wear them when I’m expected to wear a skirt, without having to think hard about how I’m holding my legs and whether my underpants are showing.” I don’t think it occurred to him that women dressed for any reason other than to please him (and others like him.)
There is certainly a strain of current thinking that all forms of expressed judgement about others is wrong. With positive expressions only slightly less wrong than negative expressions.
For those of us of an inherently judgmental personality type (c.f. Meyers-Briggs) that amounts to a requirement to simply shut up about the vast majority of our internal monologue. An uncomfortable requirement for sure.
I haven’t seen anyone saying that ‘you did a great job on that [contract, roof, piece of writing, whatever’ is wrong. Or even that accurately criticizing the job on the [contract, roof, piece of writing, whatever] is wrong. The “strain of current thinking” is that commenting on people’s bodies is wrong in most contexts.
Being expected to shut up about the vast majority of one’s internal monologue is certainly not a new requirement for many of us; whether the problem is that it’s judgemental or just that it’s about something most people aren’t interested in. The ability to natter on about whatever one happens to be thinking at the moment, without pausing to think whether saying it out loud might cause damage either to others or to one’s own reputation, and without expecting to get any criticism for it oneself no matter how critical it is of others and/or how irrelevant it is to the situation and/or the rest of the conversation, has always at most been the privilege of a few.
Lol. Someone (here, i think) plaintively asked how he could compliment a female coworker. I suggested that i have been happy to receive comments like, “that was a really great presentation”, “you explained that very clearly”, “that’s a useful way of looking at that question, i hadn’t thought of that”, and “you are very good at mentoring junior staff”.
In general, i think it’s usually appropriate to comment on what someone does, but often not okay to comment on what someone is. That’s why it’s okay to say, “i like that tie”, but you need to be careful about “i like that blouse”, to be clear you aren’t really saying, “i like seeing your boobs.”
So judging a woman for wearing “young” clothing is typically more about saying “you are old” than it is a comment about the choice of clothes.
I’m a guy. I’m about a 1/4 grey I suppose. Don’t give a single shit.
My Wife is ‘Salt and Pepper’. Looks great with the purple mirrored sunglasses she has (she loves the color purple, always has)
I knew a guy whose hair went pure white literally overnight. He had been sick a year or so before, and it could have been related. Then, a few years after that it all fell out.
Maybe that’s typically so for an opinion of “unattractive” in the sense of “if I bother to think about it, I guess I don’t happen to be sexually attracted by the visual appearance of that”.
But for an opinion of “unattractive” in the sense of “the visual appearance of that makes me feel sufficiently aesthetically uncomfortable that I feel the need to express my discomfort or criticism about it in some way”, I’m not convinced that the gulf between such an opinion and feelings of “horror and disgust” is as “vast” as you seem to believe.
Yeah, I don’t think that people who voluntarily criticize the appearance of older people as “not a good look” on the grounds that what they’re wearing is inappropriate for “a person of that age” are generally afflicted with any extreme feelings of horror and disgust. But I also don’t think they’re unaffected by systemic learned cultural prejudices about the physical appearance of old people supposedly being intrinsically repulsive.
I had long hair from the time I was a kid until I was in my 30s when I cut it short and kept it short up until my late 40s. I then went to shoulder length. I’m 61 and my hair is now halfway down my back (thanks COVID shutdown). My plan is to let it grow and when I’m “old” I will wear it in a long side braid. I liked my short hair - it was cute but short hair takes more time to fix than long hair. My short hair did anyway. I was also spending much more time and money at the salon with short hair.
I too struggle sometimes with what to wear. I don’t want to look old and frumpy. I think I look fairly young for my age and I’m in good shape. I just try to look fashionable and current without looking like I’m trying to be 25. I don’t want to give up like I see so many of the women my age do.
I don’t think I “gave up”. I was never particularly interested in fashion, even in my teens; and had pretty much decided by my late twenties that it just wasn’t something I wanted to be bothered about.
There are, of course, people who are genuinely interested in fashion, not just feeling that they have to go along with it. For the people who are genuinely interested, dressing fashionably and continuing to do so is what suits them, and they should continue doing it at whatever age. But I wouldn’t assume that the person wearing sweatpants or cargo pants and a random tshirt from the secondhand store has given up; they may be feeling liberation, not surrender – or they may have been dressing like that all along, just paying attention to different things in their lives.