What are the indicators and counterindicators towards a woman’s ability to retain her looks into the future? I say:[ul][li]Genetics. What does her mother look like?[/li][li]Diet and exercise. Well duh. All Twinkies all the time turns hottie to fattie in no time.[/li][li]Job/lifestyle. Does she toil in hard labor? Is she under a lot of stress? Does she get enough sleep?[/li][li]How much time & money does she spend on beauty products and services? In general there seems to be a positive correlation here, but not always - I can think of a couple of movie actresses who have not aged well.[/li]Cosmetic surgery procedures don’t count, as I think they are used to make repairs after your body’s already in bad shape.[/ul]Anything else?
What looks exactly were you thinking about? Body shape? Facial features? People change as they grow older, and the only women I’ve seen who don’t improve with age are the ones who counted on their natural gifts at 18 to remain with them, no matter what they did, and then became bitter when their hair got thinner and grayer, their skin got windburned and sunburned, and their bodies changed because their food intake didn’t match their activity level.
My mother is twice my age, and she doesn’t have the straight dark hair she did at my age. She doesn’t have the perfect, translucent skin, or the body features of an 18 year old. But she’s in great shape, happy with her work, and frankly, gray hair suits her. She smiles a lot, and my father and I both think she’s beautiful (not just because we love her).
If you want to marry someone who’ll be beautiful her whole life, marry a happy woman who loves herself enough to take care of her body.
No, no, no…this is not about finding a person to marry, and I realize that nobody looks 18 forever. It’s just an occasional occurrence to me when I see people on the street or in pictures, and I start wondering. I guess if I had to provide solid examples, two that jump to mind are Lauren Hutton and Liz Taylor, where Ms. Hutton is holding up much better than Ms. Taylor (yeah, I know Liz is older, but she wasn’t looking that good 20 years ago, either).
Unless there’s an adoption, you can count on the person being 70 to 85 percent parent. You are a product of your parents. Somethings can change, weight, muscle tone, etc. When it comes down to it you are your Dad Or Mom. (Even down to the phrases they use) Ugly but true.
I caught a second of an Audrey Hepburn introspective on E! the other night, and she was just gorgeous, both in her last interviews, when she was about 60 and in her heyday. Wow! Talk about your aging gracefully.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Earthling *
**…how will she look in 30 years?
What are the indicators and counterindicators towards a woman’s ability to retain her looks into the future? I say:[ul][li]Genetics. What does her mother look like? What if her mother is dead or she was adopted?[/li][li]Diet and exercise. Well duh. All Twinkies all the time turns hottie to fattie in no time.I’ve seen many women that can eat virtually anything and stay thin as a rail. Does her size really matter?[/li][li]Job/lifestyle. Does she toil in hard labor? Is she under a lot of stress? Does she get enough sleep? Ah, another one that has no bearing really. If she spends time pampering her mind (even if just a little) she can look just as good as a woman that has little stresses in her life. Each woman is different in how they react to stresses.[/li][li]How much time & money does she spend on beauty products and services? In general there seems to be a positive correlation here, but not always - I can think of a couple of movie actresses who have not aged well.Sorry, my use of drugstore cosmetics and creams does not make my skin any worse off than the woman that spends literally hundreds of dollars (sometimes thousands) per year on dept store stuff.[/li][li]Cosmetic surgery procedures don’t count, as I think they are used to make repairs after your body’s already in bad shape.[/ul]Anything else? **[/li][/QUOTE]
The bolding, of course is mine. techie, who believes that youthful looking women aren’t the signs of a beautiful person. It’s how the person meshes with the partner they are with.
BTW, what about you men?
Daddy loose his hair? (who cares some men look great with little or no hair)
Does he work in construction and will he look like a leathery old man at 50? (who cares, he works hard and hopefully he is a kind man.)
Blah, Blah, Blah.
I don’t believe in many of the things that the OP said. It’s what is attractive you to now that matters. The rest comes with a partnership that may include one partner to lose the use of his/her legs and/or arms.
It’s all dressing, it’s the person that you love deep within that matters in the long run.
Damnit…that whole thing got boogered up, try the first part again. Without the fargin (can’t say bad words in here, calm down techie, calm down) bolding crappola that the vB adds in…friggin, frackin, farkin…
Originally posted by Earthling
…how will she look in 30 years?
What are the indicators and counterindicators towards a woman’s ability to retain her looks into the future? I say:
Genetics. What does her mother look like? What if her mother is dead or she was adopted?
Diet and exercise. Well duh. All Twinkies all the time turns hottie to fattie in no time.I’ve seen many women that can eat virtually anything and stay thin as a rail. Does her size really matter?
Job/lifestyle. Does she toil in hard labor? Is she under a lot of stress? Does she get enough sleep? Ah, another one that has no bearing really. If she spends time pampering her mind (even if just a little) she can look just as good as a woman that has little stresses in her life. Each woman is different in how they react to stresses.
How much time & money does she spend on beauty products and services? In general there seems to be a positive correlation here, but not always - I can think of a couple of movie actresses who have not aged well.Sorry, my use of drugstore cosmetics and creams does not make my skin any worse off than the woman that spends literally hundreds of dollars (sometimes thousands) per year on dept store stuff.
Cosmetic surgery procedures don’t count, as I think they are used to make repairs after your body’s already in bad shape.
Anything else?
look at that young thing and then look at her parents. if they are big fat pigs then she probably will be too. if you love her then it shouldn’t matter as long as …(here is the key to eternal happiness)… you don’t try to change her destiny. is she is destined to be a shape then try to keep her healthy (diet /exercise) but don’t try to mold her into a Audry Hepburn. and the same for the ladies. if your future father-in-law is a short fat bald man then you can bet that you will be waking up to one for the rest of your life.
As if I didn’t feel bad enough about not looking as good as I get older, I have to see this thread. Yes, I was a hottie, according to a lot of people. Now, I’m a mother of four, a full time college student, and I’ve been working out for the last year desperately trying to get back into a shape where I can tuck in my shirt again. My mother had three kids and still weighed 98 lbs afterwards. I had four and I weigh, well lets just say more. I don’t eat Twinkies! Hell, I think part of my problem is that I only have time to eat one meal a day!
I kept telling myself that change was ok. I’m still the same person inside. My self-worth does not depend on a small dress size, or whether or not I still have time to do my make-up everyday. My husband still loves me, my friends don’t think less of me.
Still, somehow seeing this thread just made me feel like crap.
And the Twinkies comment really cut deep. Yeah. That’s right. I’m not a size 5 anymore, so obviously I just sit around the house eating junk food. Good stereotype. Because you know, that’s the only way to put on weight.
And by the way, if it wasn’t clear from above, I thought I would always be thin because my mother was. And my grandmother. I was looking at the wrong side of the family.
I work with a woman who is just weeks away from being 40, yet she looks like she’s younger than me (I’m 28). She’s also one of the sweetest, most sincere, most optimistic people that I know. She would also be sweet, sincere, and optimistic even if she were fat and ugly and had a big hairy wart on her nose.
I’m a rather “rotund” chick myself. (Yeah, I’m a fattie.) And I have been overweight most of my adult life (since I started having children, weight has been an issue.) But I must be doing something right. I’ve had 2 fat chick haters fall for me. One of them even married me, and is still married to me.
I know technically I’m not answering the question that the OP asked, but it kinda ticked me off to see the question. There isn’t any way you CAN tell what she’s gonna look like in 30 years, except to stay with her that long and find out. Of course by then, you’ll be no spring chicken yourself.
If weight was going to be an issue going forward, then fat (podgy) ankles (even on a thin person) gave the future away. i.e. unless they actively managed their weight they will balloon.
Thin ankles, no problem, weight gain then comes about by other external factors.
My mum taught me that, but it took a few years of research to prove it
Some people, men AND women, age “better” in accordance with popular conceptions of what’s attractive. Some factors are elective but most are pure flukes of genetics, especially underlying bone structure, etc.
I’m becoming more and more impatient with our obsession about apperance. MOST people, men and women, never fit our very narrow “ideal” of attractiveness even when they’re young. IMO we squander an enormous amount of time, effort and focus trying to force ourselves into a ridiculously narrow, artifical and STUPID mold.
There’s something drastically wrong with this picture. We’re holding up glossy paperdolls to real people and saying, “you gotta resemble this to be desireable or attractive.” Appreciating beauty is one thing even though its definition wobbles radically. It’s quite another to dismiss the giddy, glorious spectrum of human ooomph in favor of one tiny, trendy definition.
Sorry, I’m feeling grumpy about this. I’m just so tired of real life people–quirky, vital, ZINGER men and women–believing they’re somehow inadequate because their abs don’t ripple, their cheekbones and jawlines aren’t chiselled enough, whatever.
I’ve learned three things from watching the women in my family age over the last twenty or so years.
OMG the sun is bad! Someone who spends the whole summer tanning at 25 will have awful skin a few years later. I have an aunt who’s 45, but she’s sort of cute and pixieish, so she’d be able to pass for much younger, if she hadn’t destroyed her skin.
Smoking makes your skin yellow, and that looks particularly bad with wrinkles.
You have a choice between weight and wrinkles. Personally, I think a round face looks better than a wrinkly face, which is good considering that nature has decided I look best in the fattie group
So I guess what I’m saying is that if someone keeps her face out of the sun, doesn’t smoke, and gains the natural amount of weight that one should pick up as the years go by, then her skin will be healthy. Healthy skins seems to go a long way towards making someone beautiful.
Just going to put in my $.02 on roughneck men. Dad’s been working bluecollar since puberty (high iron work, boilermaker, woodsworker (lumberjack!) and, most recently, drilling). He passes for younger than a lot of the 30 to 40-year olds he works with (the things that make these guys look old is mostly their substance abuse, not the work they do.) Also has the sense to use moisturizer when he gets sun/wind/frostburn. He’s also got thinning hair, but decided to shave since he has a nice skull (although now we can see where the back of his skull was crushed once on the job… or in this accident…or that accident… hmm. Never saw the doc about that one either.)
From the look of this thread, I’m going to be better looking at age 50 than I am now. My mom and I still share clothes.
Ok, coming from a VERY Italian family, I too am not a size 5. Its unrealistic to think that all women are going to be a size 5. In my family, we all have large builds. I have very broad shoulders. I’m heavy, but I don’t look my weight. You can see I’m “chubby” but you can’t tell that I weigh as much as I do. I’m still athletic. I play softball and volleyball. I go bowling all the time. You know what? My boyfriend loves me the way I am. He sees that I’m a genuine person…I’m loving and caring. I take care of my family. I work my ass off at my job. I’m also the type that would give someone my last dime if they needed it, and I would go without. The body does not make the person. The dignity, pride, and respect do. If you respect and love yourself, you can love and respect others and they’ll love and respect you too. I could be a size 5 and be the rudest, most annoying person around. I could be that way too and be a size 20. How you present yourself to others and how you treat them is more important than how you look. I don’t know why people are so shallow and base everything on looks. get past it. You lose your looks in the end anyway.
I’ve found the opposite to be true - using a lot of makeup and “skin care products” seems to be the best way to ruin your skin. I get compliments on my skin all the time, and I rarely wear makeup. Maybe a little for special occasions. I used to when I was a teenager, but since moving to Colorado, the land of the “natural” look, I rarely wear any.
Seems to me that the heavier the makeup a woman wears everyday, the worse damage it does to her skin. Then when you add in all the “cleansers” and such products that are needed to get it off, you get seriously damaged skin.
(although now we can see where the back of his skull was crushed once on the job… or in this accident…or that accident… hmm. Never saw the doc about that one either.)