Obesity rates would disagree with you.
I think it’s a combo of:
> better cosmetic remedies to ageing – decent hair dye, cosmetic dentistry, UV-filtered moisturiser, sunscreen etc,.
> More white collar work which doesn’t take such a heavy toll on the body and skin that working in a factory or field would do
> Better – and more preventative – health care
> Younger fashions and hairstyles (my grandmother would never have worn trousers, let alone jeans).
I think that health issues weigh more here than any style or attitude changes, even if the latter are a biggie, too. People in the not-so-distant-past lead so much unhealthier lives than us, on average, that it shows. Dental care was nothing like it is today (this affects way more than just one’s teeth), minor nutritional deficiencies were commonplace (even the wealthy and famous didn’t gobble down nutritious fruit, veggies and healthy fats the year round), smoking and drinking were much more prevalent, and many types of work much more detrimental to health than today (stuff like the use of highly toxic paints or pesticides without protection, effects evident in the dementia wards today). People didn’t just look older, they were effectively older than we are at the same age.
I still see this phenomenon at work when dealing with old-school construction workers, who incidentally retain much of the old ways mentioned above. Plenty of guys who look like 50 when they’re 35. Hard outdoor work, simple foods, plenty of sun, wind, booze and cigs make a huge difference.
ETA: Yes, people are fatter today than 50 years ago, but healthier in every other way. And the health-conscious people are way healthier in every regard than their grandparents ever were.
There is some merit about the idea that make up in movies and TV just makes people look decades younger. Every time I see one of those pictures on the internet when some guy meets a celebrity in the street, the actors look like their own grandparents.
And those things are better now than they were 50 years ago; we have much better technology for everything from lights to hair dye.
That said, I think along with things like healthy diets making people look younger, you need to take into account pain management. For my money, nothing ages a person like chronic pain. It wears you out like Chinese Water Torture, leaving you with no resources for anything else. It seems like I don’t know anyone over 50 who hasn’t had some sort of procedure done on their joints: bone spurs cut out, rotator cuff repaired, ACL reattached, etc. All those people–damn near everyone I know–would have had a life of low-level chronic pain and limited mobility, often starting in their late 40s/early 50s. Arthritis is the same: it used to not be at all uncommon for a person in their 60s to be rendered incapable of independent living entirely because of arthritis; people in their 40s and 50s often couldn’t go about daily tasks without pain. That is no longer the case.
This is true. At least, I assume it is, or perhaps American high-school kids really are mostly in their mid-20s.
I think that’s a very big part of it. People just don’t spend nearly as much time outdoors as they used to - even people in the past who didn’t do manual work outdoors would walk places, rather than getting into a car in the garage, driving to the garage at work and taking the lift to their office without ever seeing the outside world. And when they do go outdoors, they wear sunscreen a lot. Even everyday moisturisers and men’s after-shave balms often have sun protection in them.
Just tossing in another factor here: 60s TV wasn’t shot with the intention that it would be viewed on giant hi-dev screens. Sitcoms were done very much on the cheap and extras wouldn’t spend a lot of time in the makeup chair. A lot of actors now won’t appear anywhere without heavy makeup to cover the lines on their faces that would now be readily seen.
And what about modern nations that don’t have high obesity rates? Oh, right, folks look younger there, too.
Ever see someone thin with bad nutrition? They tend to look older beyond their years.
One thing easy to be struck by with the (50+ years) past: people were thin. Like, really thin. And smaller all around.
Tons of McDonalds may not be great for the waistline, but the amount of nutrition (and avoidance of childhood diseases and other debilitating deals) that even the average overweight person gets is more than most people in the past got.
People look different today because they are different today, for good or ill.
People looking younger than their same-aged counterparts of bygone days is something I’ve been noticing for about 20 years now.
Memo to everyone here: You look older than you think!
Just joking 
Alot of it is stress. Life was harder. People worked hard. People got sick more and died younger. People drank more and lived harder.
Actresses nowadays live in bubbles. A wealthy actress is going to stop the aging process as much as humanly possible. And the human race has gotten better at that like others have said. Alot of those actors and actresses are vegetarian believe it or not. If they aren’t veg, generally they have strict eating habits… looking good is their lively hood.
The hard livinf actresses of today do not look that great without all the make up and protected picture taking.
Related to this but in the opposite direction, I’ve often been struck by a strange “smooth” quality to people’s faces in old photographs. Here’s an example (ignoring the grain), and here is another, albeit less clear. They look almost mask-like, with no wrinkles or anything. Were such photos routinely airbrushed, or was it an artefact of the lighting or something?
Don’t know about airbrushing, but there are a lot of techniques for modifying photographs. They could be done in the darkroom or just painted and reproduced. Those look like they’ve been adjusted to me, but I’m no expert.
Youth culture is fostered more nowadays, I do believe. Not to mention, 40 years ago, by 30 you had been married 10 years, had your kids, and no matter what you were doing you were WORKING YOUR ASS OFF AT IT.
Now…people are still in school at 30. We’re on our second or 3rd generation of arrested adolescence, with drugs that purport to keep you young long into your 80s.
So yeah, I think attitude is a lot of it. Rather than maturity and responsibility being big factors, youth and energy are considered the trademarks of the well-off, so any way to imitate that…rather than, say, wearing makeup to make you look OLDER…is scooped up by everyone.
I have always gotten comments that I look much younger than my age, and my answer has always been the same: “No kids, no marriage, no responsibilities; of COURSE I look younger! I AM younger!”
Is it coincidence that my hair started graying when I finally did get married at 45? 
Old family portraits at my home are all retouched. In one photo every member of the family has lightened, smooth skin, rouged cheeks and lips, and bright green eyes. The dad’s swarthy stubble which is evident in candid photos appears as smooth as the baby’s skin, and the baby’s eyelashes are penned in. Not nearly as bad as 80’s glamour shots, but artificial and contrived all the same.
People WERE actually older in the past. That is to say, it’s well documented that people are taking longer to enter the conventional trappings of adulthood - job, house, marriage, kids.
Plus, we dress a lot more casually these days, which makes people appear younger. Take a look at those olde tymie photographs. Like the ones in the college student center of the 1922 basketball team. Everyone wore suits! Nowadays guys in their 40s wear jeans and hoodies around.
As a couple of folks pointed out, the whole concept of “youth culture” is a relatively recent phenomenon too. At first it was just teenagers, but it has expanded to include 20 somethings as well. From high school through college and shortly afterwards, young people are in a sort of transitional “limbo” state. They are preparing for eventual adulthood, but they don’t generally have any real responsibilities beyond going to class and maybe paying their rent. It’s really a different world from the adult world with it’s own customs, music and fashion.
And the fact that this demographic is so heavily marketed to lends it a much greater perceived importance than it should have.
In short, the whole meme age 16 to age 29 being a care free, non stop orgy of sex, drugs, alchohol and rock music has contributed to people appearing younger now than they did in the past. Because, quite simply, they look, act and dress like kids.
Although the flip side of this is that I think TV kids look much older now than they did 20 or 30 years ago.
Careful! That’s my high school year book you’re talking about!
My last high school reunion most of us were around 58 years old. In general I would say the women looked better than the men but all in all most looked much younger than their parents did at a coresponding age.
Actually, Lindsay Lohan is kind of the flip-side of the phenomenon mentioned in this thread- she’s what… 28, and already looks rode hard and put up wet.
Contrast this with much older, yet not so “worn” looking actresses like Salma Hayek, etc…
I started thinking about this a few years back when I realized I was the same age as Carrol O’Connor when “All in the Family” premiered.
Now I’m as old as Carrol O’Connor when “All in the Family” was at its peak. Listen, there’s no way I look or act as old as my hero Archie Bunker!
I think hairstyles is a big part of it. It was a revelation to me that what I grew up thinking of as “old lady hair” was really just pop hairstyles from the 1930s and 1940s. Likewise, I can’t look at hair and makeup from the 1980s, even on young people, without it feeling really old to me. No matter how young they may be, with feathered hair and blue eyeshadow, they will always look like my mother.
Yep. I run into women with perms, bang rolls, winter tans and liquid eyeliner and know they graduated in the 80’s. My beauty regimen consists of 1) not dating my look with trends from decades past. There is no 2).
