# Did people just look older in the past?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-people-just-look-older-in-the-past/641029>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [November 14, 2012, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-people-just-look-older-in-the-past/641029 "2012-11-14T21:08:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 5

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**Author:** ![phouka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c5a1d2/32.png) [@phouka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/phouka)\
**Post date:** [November 19, 2012, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-people-just-look-older-in-the-past/641029/81 "2012-11-19T18:15:13Z")

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> [@Ruby](#):
>
> (dammit. missed the edit window)
> 
> People today “look” differently in the face than our older counterparts. Walgreens has a commercial [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC12nr2QRZM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC12nr2QRZM) now that goes back in time from the 20’s, 40’s, etc. and you can tell just by the actor’s faces that they are modern people and not from that era.

Yes, and no.

What’s really off about that commercial is that every one they show is young. Even now, there’s no such thing as a drug store that has only young customers.

Even then, the young people being shown are startlingly whole and healthy. There are no scars, no tumors, no lost teeth, no walleyes, no limps, no missing limbs, no anything that shows this is a population which has survived disease and war on a scale we can’t imagine.

All that being said, much of what causes people to look so different in old-timey pictures is the technology being used. I wasn’t able to find the picture online, but if you watch the PBS series _The 1900 House_, they take an old time photograph of the family in the back garden. It takes an enormous amount of set up. The photographer had an antique camera with bellows and a drape to cover his head, and he held up a flash bar loaded with magnesium powder. The exposure took (I think) a couple of seconds. The result looked like this family really had time traveled to the 1900s. Yet, a promotion photo taken with modern photography technology of them in their antique clothes, [here](http://infactcollaborative.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/the-strangest-reality-show-in-the-world-1900-houses.jpg) that they then 'shopped to make it look antique looks fake - like modern people pretending to live in the year 1900.

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