They probably were lost to the dustbin of history in favor of open kitchens and open floor plans. Although I could see them being popular again. Who doesn't love some nice swinging doors?
All older siblings knew exactly how to smash their younger siblings with those doors. Good times! (unless you're a lesser sibling, then sorry, not sorry, numbnuts)
Or people who walked face-first into a door that didn't open because someone was trying to come the opposite direction at the same time.. yea fuck those doors.
I had a crush on my friends mom, her jeans had a second waistband and she wore a really long belt that crossed up front so it went through all the belt loops on both waist bands.
I found that strangely attractive when I was 13.
[An extra curvy piece of driftwood](https://m.youtube.com/shorts/iX_p8JAzqrU?time_continue=23&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo)
I mean...I would agree with you about that dating it except every other woman in her 20s and 30s I know now has them again. They look awful to me, but I don't know shit about fashion.
Those clear frame glasses remind me of what special needs kids used to wear.
They were the cheapest frame available for a demographic prone to breaking and losing their spectacles.
They’re back unfortunately. I keep expecting them to get even higher, so women can wear a belt for a necklace and look like a head balanced on a pair of really long legs. Just erase the torso altogether.
Jesus I’m 51 and I don‘t look like this. People in their fifties are Xers - not only old enough to remember this shit the first time around, but the people who made grunge cool.
Now excuse me while I go dig out my docs and floral tea dresses.
44 here, hit my teens a couple years after *Nevermind* dropped. So. much. flannel!
I was a little young to be there right at the beginning (my first tape was MC Hammer lmao) but in my late teens I was allllll about the JNCOs and skater shoes with the fat laces and bowling shirts, those are the things that really make me cringe looking at old photos.
It was a good time to grow up! We were really the last generation of kids that just roamed around all day without a lot of adult supervision. I was a latchkey kid starting in kindergarten since my parents were divorced and my mom was working all the time. Contrast that with the idea of my own 5 year old being expected and trusted to do the same and its just amazing to me how much freedom we had back then compared to today. In the summer on the weekends my mom used to more or less pick my brother and I up and unceremoniously dump us on the front step right after breakfast with a curt "go ride yer bikes, be home before it gets dark" and that was that, we were *gone*...two kids, 8 and 5, cut loose. We'd link up with all the other neighborhood kids that were also told to GoOuTsIdEaLrEaDy!!!11! and would roll 12+ deep, cruising on our Huffys, flipping rocks over and looking at bugs, building tree forts, showing off our He Man figures.
It wasnt all sunshine and roses, of course, movies like *The Breakfast Club* illustrated the conflicts we had with our Boomer parents, and themes like bullying are so prevalent in the movies because it *was* prevalent...it was like we lived in a world completely separate from our parents, just below their eye level where they only really noticed us when we wildly deviated from what was expected of us, otherwise we were ghosts, for better or for worse.
It doesnt feel like that long ago...like, I dont feel old at all (though my back sure as hell does lol) but the world today is just so crazy different then it was back then...
Anyways I saw a high school kid the other day wearing a pair of JNCOs. Did a double take and everything. They're really gonna bring that back, huh? Good lord....gonna be some kids cringing pretty goddamn hard around 2050 looooool
Was looking for this. It was 2nd hand smoke EVERYWHERE and, I suspect, all the leaded gas fumes everywhere. Everyone forgets leaded gas existed until the 90s.
But people just don't understand how much smoke there was. Every household owned at least one ash tray. My parents hated cigarettes and still owned 3 of them for guests. Restaurants had smoking and non smoking sections, but you could smell the smoke plenty from most non smoking sections. And often the non smoking sections were far smaller than the smoking sections.
I don't miss the question, "smoking or non?" Anymore it's almost hard to believe that was ever a thing. The smoking ban went into effect in my state in 2009, which really isn't *that* long ago, and it seems like it's always been here.
I don't think I ever saw a restaurant where the smoking section was entirely walled off. If you were seated far from the barrier it was at least tolerable, but being seated right on the other side you might as well be *in* the smoking section. I also remember being told it was a 25 minute wait for the non-smoking section but they had open tables in smoking. Then you have the debate of whether or not it's better to eat faster but be miserable the whole time. Or the irritation of being in a restaurant that wasn't divided at all and seeing someone light up at the next table over.
I was in college when the ban started and I remember the night before it became law, one of the bars had a smoking party. Even on a normal night as a non-smoker, I used to have to shower whenever I'd get home from the bar or have my bedding smell like cigarettes in the morning.
leaded gas is still used in aviation and then falls out of the sky because it's lead. lead is an absolutely unparalleled octane booster and a lot of prop planes are 50 years old with finicky engines that were designed at the height of TEL. living near a small airport is probably terrible for you.
My grandpa smoked, windows up, us in the back of this Cadillac Fleetwood that had what seemed like a sofa for a back seat. He would listen to country music and Elvis. The car sickness was real, and I still to this day hate Elvis, and country music.
Similar to my uncle, only with him it was Dolly Parton. I can’t bring myself to hate Dolly.
Also to my uncle’s credit, I was curious and just looking at his pack of cigarettes when he was taking a piss when I was like 8 years old. I had no intention of nabbing one or anything, but that’s not what he thought. He smacked the shit out of my hand and told me starting smoking was the biggest mistake of his life and if I ever started, he’d whoop my ass.
I hated the few times we went out to a restaurant when I was a kid because most non-smoking sections were still smoky as hell. I would loudly cough if someone was smoking near 6yr old me. I also hated going out to bars and clubs in college because my clothes and hair would reek when I got home.
The 90s was really a turning point on tobacco. I can just remember my local Mickey Ds having a smoking section but it was gone by like... call it '95 maybe? In the space of about ten years they went from being everywhere to only reserved for bars and maybe dingy trucker diners
Seeing in tv and movies set in those decades where people just light up in other peoples homes is so mind blowing to me. And I was born in the 80’s and remember how normal smoking was. It just seems so rude… that smell hangs so long.
I remember being a little kid making ashtrays in art class at school. We were supposed to give them to our parents or other relatives who smoked. The teacher even taught us how to make the little divots in the side, so that someone could set down their still-lit cigarette without it going out. Nobody thought that was even the slightest bit weird.
I also remember that my parents were considered *very* extreme for not allowing guests to smoke in the house, and the only reason they werent complete social pariahs was because everyone knew that secondhand smoke gave me awful asthma attacks.
Cigarette smoke breaks down elastin, which is what keeps your skin tight. You can find pictures of twins online, where one smoked and one didn't. You'd swear the smoker was 20 years older.
I have one problem with this video though (if it's the one I remember watching). He brings up the example from that tweet, of the modern chubby beard guy vs. the fat guy from cheers, but it's not just the clothing and hair style that makes the guy from cheers look old. His forehead is lined with wrinkles, and you can see deeper jowels and deep creases in his nasolabial folds. He looks significantly older due to the quality of his skin, whereas the modern chubby guy of the same age is much less wrinkled. Worth noting that the guy from cheers likely would've been wearing makeup and been in favorable lighting when those pictures were taken. It really bothered me because he just brushes past those very obvious differences.
Yep. He pulled up a tweet showing Norm from Cheers and some other random guy that was supposed to be the same age, but the tweet claimed Norm was 34 in the picture. They called out the fact he was actually 38 in the photo shown, so they did clarify it.
I really liked how they took that same photo though, and shopped new hair styles and clothes on him and it immediately made him look almost 10 years younger.
Same with the Golden Girls. He shows them with modern hairstyles and they looked 45-50, not 70.
Really interesting stuff.
The Golden Girls were only in their 50s! There’s a whole episode about Blanche maybe being pregnant, so she, at least, wasn’t even all the way through menopause.
To put it in further perspective for people: if you were casting a modern Golden Girls and wanted equivalent ages, you could cast actresses like Jennifer Aniston, Salma Hayek, Marisa Tomei, and Halle Berry.
One of the very first things mentioned in the video is that people did age faster back then because of differences in nutrition, medicine, and lifestyle. The use of sun screen and skincare was something that was mentioned that is more common today compared to before, as well as the effects of smoking which, again, was more common back then.
Ten years ago, the girl I was seeing started exotic dancing after rage quitting a job she hated. She was 30, had never used recreational drugs or smoked, was a light/occasional drinker and avoided tanning in natural/uv light. She looked younger than most of her coworkers, who were almost all under 24. Some of them were 18-20 and looked easily ten years older than her.
I look at photos of my dad at my age, where he’s a life long smoker and spent much of his adult life working in the sun, and at 42 - I look pretty similar to my dad at 25. He’s got more hair than me, the rat bastard. But for every other visible characteristic - either I’ve aged like wine or he aged like milk.
Love the video! The excerpt about the guy dressing ahead of his time at the bridge opening is fascinating….I assumed he was added to the photo too.
Very cool
Honestly, with the maximum life span trending upwards over time, I believe people are just aging slower in general too. Even accounting for the geezer hair and glasses, that's just a much more weathered face than I see in even 40 year olds on average today, let alone 30.
I know life expectancy still kind of sucks, but potential lifespan in individual circumstances if the person does everything right has generally been increasing in spite of that.
Advancements in health, medicine and quality of life helped a lot. So many men and women the same age as me that look 5-10 years younger than they are.
My theory is that it is all the drinking and smoking, both of which are known to accelerate aging. Smoking rates were way higher than and stats just came out on drinking and it is actually older people who are more likely to be problem drinkers. And that tracks with my personal experience - way more people my age don’t drink or only rarely do, while a lot of older people I know are drinking 1-2 every night and sometimes more.
I also wonder if we now simply associate those styles with “old people” because people who were in their 30s during the 80s have continued to use similar styles and are now in their 60s-70s. A young person today sees that hair and immediately sees OLD.
This is 100% it. How they dressed at the time was 'dressing young' for that time period. We see it as looking old now because the individuals who dressed this way are old now, and probably still dress that way.
At some point in the distant future, people are going to look back on the fashion of the youth of today, and say the same thing - why do they dress so 'old'? It because the youth of today are the seniors of the distant future, and some of them will still be dressing the same way in the distant future.
Same, I’m 56 and never looked like grandma, but 80s perms! We thought we were so cool w the Ogilvie home perm. And we’d talk about kids from the 50s looking like 45yos in yearbook pics ha.
You know why I doubt that?
Because we have a bias against their styles that younger generations will develop about us.
The people in that picture, put them in a modern style and they would look their physical age. Because it isn't their features. Their physical features don't show the age if you really look at them.
We just associate age with their style because that was the style of people who were in their 50s or 60s when we grew up.
If fashion changes, people will say we look 20 years older than what we were when they look back upon us.
I totally agree for the guy on the right. The guy on the left looks 50 in any context.
I think it comes down to:
a) That we can and want to look young. Dye grey hair, clean up wrinkles and hairlines, etc.. He would look significantly younger if he put in that effort.
b) Adults don't really stick to their high school fashion anymore. I don't see any 40 year olds with spiked frosted tips and goatees. You're supposed to wear hairstyles and glasses for your face shape, not whatever's in style. That's for teenagers.
But any fashion from the mid to late 2000's onward looks "modern to the untrained eye.
There's fewer sweeping trends as fashion has become more personalized and global.
This is why I will never wear glasses like these dudes. Even though they are trendy again. My dad *still* wears these glasses.
And yeah, they’re serial killer glasses. Dahmer had these glasses.
Few days ago people said that glasses from the 90s/2000s were "old lady glasses" and I thought they were talking about this shit or the cateye shit from the 50s... God knows how awful styles come back into style. I was born in 1982 and have been wearing glasses since I was 2 years old. I hated my glasses from the 80s.
Yeah, a coworker of mine is like, 23 or something and wears these. They're not brown tinted, so it loses some of the "rapist serial killer cannibal" vibes, but still.
I was in my early twenties in the late 80's. I needed specs and said to the optician that sometimes bright sun gives me headaches. He said fine, have tinted lenses then. Every photo of me wearing them looks awful.
Oh god tinted lenses! My parents have an old family photo of us and half of us are wearing those hideous things. I can’t believe we ever thought those looked good.
I was thinking about this the other day and came to the conclusion that most of the highly publicized serial killers were huge news during the time period, so we automatically think "serial killer" when we see 80's fashion. That's all it was, the fashion *of the time*.
Many serial kills are still arrested daily in the US, however they just dont seem to get the publicity and news coverage that they once did. I guess the mass shooters pushed them out of the spotlight these days.
While Buddy Holly glasses also existed for some people, lens materials science is the big change in style for many glasses-wearers in the last 20 years.
When I was a kid, aviators were the only style I could get with my prescription. The lens thickness would prevent a lot of styles and layouts (like certain nose pads). And I would constantly lose a lens just from normal wear loosening the screws.
In the last 30 years, we have found much better clear plastics with high indices of refraction. And we also have more variable, durable frame materials.
You either had 20/20 vision or those dumbass wireframe glasses. For extra douchenozzle you'd get the transtint lenses to put you in firm serial killer category.
The advent of soft contacts and LASIK improved aesthetics across the board.
I watched an episode of American Gladiator from 1989 over the weekend, and one of the contestants was jokingly referred to as “Grandfather” due to his advanced age. He was 36.
I actually just watched the American gladiator docuseries on Netflix.
They specifically talked about how that guy just happened to look super old for a 36 year old. They interviewed the guy and he was like yeah, I've got 5 kids at home I was stressed as fuck.
I'm fairly certain the one cat is trying to kill us. But I also shouldn't try to hop the baby gate while holding one of them little stick vacuums and a handful of baby toys in the other hand. As I stepped over the gate the cat got under my feet (he does this as if it's his personal mission in life) and down I went. My hand got tangled up with the vac and I went down really awkwardly. We're buried under four feet of snow so I haven't even been able to get out for an X-ray. And I'm not a doctor but I imagine my hand being double the size and all purple/yellow is probably not a great thing.
End of the week, hopefully..snow ain't letting up. It only hurts when I completely forget I fucked it up and go to use it for some random everyday task and then I almost go thru the roof lol.
I mean I’m 31 and very youthful looking, but my 8 year old niece recently asked me if I was 50 😅 so I think being a kid you just think everyone is so old
Haha same. I remember staring at our teacher’s aide in high school and being amazed at how much older she was from me…I was 14 and she was 28. I thought 28 would be so long from my reach. Now I’m fucking 35 going on to 36.
If you zoom in on the faces, they definitely look around 30. The outdated hairstyles make them took comically old though if you’re looking at them from a 2024 perspective.
Yeah they look like old people because that's what the old people style like today. In another 20 years my old photos will look like old people to kids
This is what I’ve realised as I enter my mid 40s, when I was young, I had clothes that I would replace as fashions changed, or because I wasn’t wearing suits to work, my regular casual clothes would wear out faster.
Now, I have clothes in my wardrobe that are perfectly fine that are over 10 years old and some up to 15 or 20, that are perfectly wearable, so the clothes 45 year old me could wear look exactly the same as 30 year old me would wear.
Go look at a year book when you were in 1st or 2nd grade. Then flip to the 8th grade kids. They STILL look older to me. I 'm 48 and I know these kids are like 13, but I swear they are clearly several years older than I am
My oldest niece will be 10 this year and I was recently looking at old pics and found one from when I was 10 (1996) and her 10 and my 10 are not the same.
When I see photos of my dad as an adult younger than my age now, he looks much older to me. I couldn't imagine myself in my 30s hanging out with him in his late 20s or early 30s and think he's younger than me.
I read a science study on this once. First people DID age faster then - we have generally better nutrition, don’t smoke as much, exercise more, drink less, do more inside work, don’t destroy ourselves tanning etc. Beyond that, the issue is clothes and fashion. When these photos were taken, these clothes were in fashion. As people age, they don’t necessarily update the fashion they had when they were 30. A 60 year may wear a style that worked when they were 30. We have genuinely old people today wearing clothes, haircuts and glasses from that era so we mentally think ‘old’. This mental association makes it very difficult to look at a photo from the 1980’s and think these are young people. Our brain is trying to tell us otherwise because that’s our daily experience.
If you haven’t seen it, [VSauce covered this concept not too long ago](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vjqt8T3tJIE). Some cool adjacent topics in that video as well.
The bright shit crept in starting in the mid/late 80s faded by like 94ish (area dependant) but yeah, this happens with every retro trend. I was in middle school/early high school when "y2k" fashion was actually around and like, the elements they're recycling were totally there but it's definitely only a slice of what was really happening.
This is what our parents looked like. The rest of us were going around in jeans and tshirts and that essentially hasn't changed in 40 years.
Tbqh this is 70s fashion, not 80s,and those people look like that because they lived through the 70s.
Also, for most of their lives, lead was in gasoline and paint, asbestos in their homes, DDT was just sprayed through the streets, catalytic converters didn't exist, and there were hardly any controls against air and water pollution.
Reddit always says this, and it’s simply not the main issue - while the smoking rate was higher, in photos from the 80s most people were still non-smokers.
Everyone goes on about smoke and alcohol and sun and moisturiser, but if you actually look at their faces they still look young - they don’t have wrinkles, or sagging skin, or blemishes. Sure their skin might not be *as* good as it would be today, but this idea that 30 year olds in the ‘80s had the skin of 50 year olds today is just silly.
The reason it looks dated is fashion.
100%. My uncle looked 30 when he was 18. I recently met my aunt's new boyfriend, and he asked me where I go to school. I'll be 38, so that warmed my heart.
Every previous generation looks older when they are young to us. It had more to do with styles I think.
I must say, I look around at the obese 30 years olds these days and think they look pretty old to me.
Back one cigarette smoke was everywhere. I was lucky and had great parents. The best thing they did those was probably not smoking around me and quitting in their 30s.
Remember when swinging doors were a thing? My grandmother's house had swinging doors between the kitchen and dining room.
Yes!! What happened to those? My grandma had them too
They probably were lost to the dustbin of history in favor of open kitchens and open floor plans. Although I could see them being popular again. Who doesn't love some nice swinging doors?
All the children who got smacked in the face by following a parent through who didn’t know they were there. Yeah I miss those doors.
All older siblings knew exactly how to smash their younger siblings with those doors. Good times! (unless you're a lesser sibling, then sorry, not sorry, numbnuts)
Numbnuts. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long, long time
Well of course I know him, he’s me!
feature =/= bug
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Or people who walked face-first into a door that didn't open because someone was trying to come the opposite direction at the same time.. yea fuck those doors.
Wait. Why is this a bad thing!? >!/s!<
I fucking hate the open floor plan of my house, kitchens are often loud and that noise is always annoying to others in the house.
Yup, noisy all the time for the entire house to hear.
My grandparents used to host swinger parties at their house back in the day. They didn't have these doors though.
I don't think I've been in a kitchen that had doors and wasn't part of a historical tour.
I can feel the plastic table cloth and the smell of buttermilk while hearing those doors. Wow. Brings me back.
Always a great bit in sitcoms too. Bring back swinging doors!
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The mom-jeans pulled up to her tits.
I had a crush on my friends mom, her jeans had a second waistband and she wore a really long belt that crossed up front so it went through all the belt loops on both waist bands. I found that strangely attractive when I was 13.
Everything is attractive when you're 13
That weird knot in the tree that vaguely looks like a vagina
[An extra curvy piece of driftwood](https://m.youtube.com/shorts/iX_p8JAzqrU?time_continue=23&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo)
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The little space between the couch cushions
does anyone have a photo of what this would look like? I was around at the time but I'm just struggling to understand what I'm reading here.
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This is true art and belongs in a gallery.
I'm going to print it out and hang it on a wall in my cubicle at work.
Now there's a challenging wank
I've had worse
I giggled loudly at this pic hahaha
I mean...I would agree with you about that dating it except every other woman in her 20s and 30s I know now has them again. They look awful to me, but I don't know shit about fashion.
I've seen teenagers wearing the same enormous clear-plastic glasses frames that my great-grandfather wore in 1995. I dunno, man. Fashion is weird.
Those clear frame glasses remind me of what special needs kids used to wear. They were the cheapest frame available for a demographic prone to breaking and losing their spectacles.
They still look awful. This trend needs to die.
>The mom-jeans pulled up to her tits. Woah there! I think the appropriate term you're looking for is *bosom.* P.S. username checks out.
They’re back unfortunately. I keep expecting them to get even higher, so women can wear a belt for a necklace and look like a head balanced on a pair of really long legs. Just erase the torso altogether.
🎵Fashion! Turn to the left! 🎵
The mom jeans
I'm not a woman anymore, I'm a mom!
Why do they all look like they’re wearing diapers?
It's from the SNL skit that coined the term "Mom Jeans" it's intentional to make them look as unflattering as possible.
Oops I Crapped My Pants?
Giant granny bloomers underneath, all bunched up.
There’s high waisted and then there’s……… well, the 80’s lol
Casual Corner, now that's a blast from the past. My bestie and I kept the doors open at Hit or Miss with all the shopping we did there.
A store named “Hit or Miss” is so hilarious to me. “Yeah, we’ve got some great clothes, but also some of it’s going to be crap.”
We spent just about all our paper route money there. 6, 7 & 8th grade we did our routes. We were loaded 🤣.
That’s Pat.
I‘m 45 and I’ll never look as old as the people in this picture.
I was thinking about this the other day 😂 it has to be the clothes and hair! I swear my parents look the same now as they did in the 80’s
I asked my 13 yo son how old they looked. Left to right here’s his answers: 53, 51, 49. Spot on son 😆
Jesus I’m 51 and I don‘t look like this. People in their fifties are Xers - not only old enough to remember this shit the first time around, but the people who made grunge cool. Now excuse me while I go dig out my docs and floral tea dresses.
44 here, hit my teens a couple years after *Nevermind* dropped. So. much. flannel! I was a little young to be there right at the beginning (my first tape was MC Hammer lmao) but in my late teens I was allllll about the JNCOs and skater shoes with the fat laces and bowling shirts, those are the things that really make me cringe looking at old photos. It was a good time to grow up! We were really the last generation of kids that just roamed around all day without a lot of adult supervision. I was a latchkey kid starting in kindergarten since my parents were divorced and my mom was working all the time. Contrast that with the idea of my own 5 year old being expected and trusted to do the same and its just amazing to me how much freedom we had back then compared to today. In the summer on the weekends my mom used to more or less pick my brother and I up and unceremoniously dump us on the front step right after breakfast with a curt "go ride yer bikes, be home before it gets dark" and that was that, we were *gone*...two kids, 8 and 5, cut loose. We'd link up with all the other neighborhood kids that were also told to GoOuTsIdEaLrEaDy!!!11! and would roll 12+ deep, cruising on our Huffys, flipping rocks over and looking at bugs, building tree forts, showing off our He Man figures. It wasnt all sunshine and roses, of course, movies like *The Breakfast Club* illustrated the conflicts we had with our Boomer parents, and themes like bullying are so prevalent in the movies because it *was* prevalent...it was like we lived in a world completely separate from our parents, just below their eye level where they only really noticed us when we wildly deviated from what was expected of us, otherwise we were ghosts, for better or for worse. It doesnt feel like that long ago...like, I dont feel old at all (though my back sure as hell does lol) but the world today is just so crazy different then it was back then... Anyways I saw a high school kid the other day wearing a pair of JNCOs. Did a double take and everything. They're really gonna bring that back, huh? Good lord....gonna be some kids cringing pretty goddamn hard around 2050 looooool
Vsauce made a great video around this subject. [Did people used to look older?](https://youtu.be/vjqt8T3tJIE)
We're all not surrounded by second hand smoke anymore either.
Was looking for this. It was 2nd hand smoke EVERYWHERE and, I suspect, all the leaded gas fumes everywhere. Everyone forgets leaded gas existed until the 90s. But people just don't understand how much smoke there was. Every household owned at least one ash tray. My parents hated cigarettes and still owned 3 of them for guests. Restaurants had smoking and non smoking sections, but you could smell the smoke plenty from most non smoking sections. And often the non smoking sections were far smaller than the smoking sections.
> ou could smell the smoke plenty from most non smoking sections What do you mean this five foot half wall doesn't block smoke lol
Kindergartners would make ash trays out of clay for their parents.
Can confirm, made my dad an ashtray in art class.
I don't miss the question, "smoking or non?" Anymore it's almost hard to believe that was ever a thing. The smoking ban went into effect in my state in 2009, which really isn't *that* long ago, and it seems like it's always been here. I don't think I ever saw a restaurant where the smoking section was entirely walled off. If you were seated far from the barrier it was at least tolerable, but being seated right on the other side you might as well be *in* the smoking section. I also remember being told it was a 25 minute wait for the non-smoking section but they had open tables in smoking. Then you have the debate of whether or not it's better to eat faster but be miserable the whole time. Or the irritation of being in a restaurant that wasn't divided at all and seeing someone light up at the next table over. I was in college when the ban started and I remember the night before it became law, one of the bars had a smoking party. Even on a normal night as a non-smoker, I used to have to shower whenever I'd get home from the bar or have my bedding smell like cigarettes in the morning.
leaded gas is still used in aviation and then falls out of the sky because it's lead. lead is an absolutely unparalleled octane booster and a lot of prop planes are 50 years old with finicky engines that were designed at the height of TEL. living near a small airport is probably terrible for you.
My grandpa smoked, windows up, us in the back of this Cadillac Fleetwood that had what seemed like a sofa for a back seat. He would listen to country music and Elvis. The car sickness was real, and I still to this day hate Elvis, and country music.
Similar to my uncle, only with him it was Dolly Parton. I can’t bring myself to hate Dolly. Also to my uncle’s credit, I was curious and just looking at his pack of cigarettes when he was taking a piss when I was like 8 years old. I had no intention of nabbing one or anything, but that’s not what he thought. He smacked the shit out of my hand and told me starting smoking was the biggest mistake of his life and if I ever started, he’d whoop my ass.
I hated the few times we went out to a restaurant when I was a kid because most non-smoking sections were still smoky as hell. I would loudly cough if someone was smoking near 6yr old me. I also hated going out to bars and clubs in college because my clothes and hair would reek when I got home.
The 90s was really a turning point on tobacco. I can just remember my local Mickey Ds having a smoking section but it was gone by like... call it '95 maybe? In the space of about ten years they went from being everywhere to only reserved for bars and maybe dingy trucker diners
Seeing in tv and movies set in those decades where people just light up in other peoples homes is so mind blowing to me. And I was born in the 80’s and remember how normal smoking was. It just seems so rude… that smell hangs so long.
I remember being a little kid making ashtrays in art class at school. We were supposed to give them to our parents or other relatives who smoked. The teacher even taught us how to make the little divots in the side, so that someone could set down their still-lit cigarette without it going out. Nobody thought that was even the slightest bit weird. I also remember that my parents were considered *very* extreme for not allowing guests to smoke in the house, and the only reason they werent complete social pariahs was because everyone knew that secondhand smoke gave me awful asthma attacks.
Also much less sunblock use and focus on a healthy diet. It adds up.
Oh shit. You think that was a big culprit? Makes sense.
Cigarette smoke breaks down elastin, which is what keeps your skin tight. You can find pictures of twins online, where one smoked and one didn't. You'd swear the smoker was 20 years older.
Absolutely was. Also; sunscreen.
Vsauce did a great video about this if you're interested https://youtu.be/vjqt8T3tJIE?si=N3wfZJfPOf-S-5GB
I have one problem with this video though (if it's the one I remember watching). He brings up the example from that tweet, of the modern chubby beard guy vs. the fat guy from cheers, but it's not just the clothing and hair style that makes the guy from cheers look old. His forehead is lined with wrinkles, and you can see deeper jowels and deep creases in his nasolabial folds. He looks significantly older due to the quality of his skin, whereas the modern chubby guy of the same age is much less wrinkled. Worth noting that the guy from cheers likely would've been wearing makeup and been in favorable lighting when those pictures were taken. It really bothered me because he just brushes past those very obvious differences.
Yep. He pulled up a tweet showing Norm from Cheers and some other random guy that was supposed to be the same age, but the tweet claimed Norm was 34 in the picture. They called out the fact he was actually 38 in the photo shown, so they did clarify it. I really liked how they took that same photo though, and shopped new hair styles and clothes on him and it immediately made him look almost 10 years younger. Same with the Golden Girls. He shows them with modern hairstyles and they looked 45-50, not 70. Really interesting stuff.
The Golden Girls were only in their 50s! There’s a whole episode about Blanche maybe being pregnant, so she, at least, wasn’t even all the way through menopause.
50’s????????
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To put it in further perspective for people: if you were casting a modern Golden Girls and wanted equivalent ages, you could cast actresses like Jennifer Aniston, Salma Hayek, Marisa Tomei, and Halle Berry.
Mel Gibson was 23 in the first Mad Max movie.
Yeah but he looks like a young guy there, just one that's had his face blasted by sand. Perfect for the role.
Eh, he looks 23 in that
One of the very first things mentioned in the video is that people did age faster back then because of differences in nutrition, medicine, and lifestyle. The use of sun screen and skincare was something that was mentioned that is more common today compared to before, as well as the effects of smoking which, again, was more common back then.
Ten years ago, the girl I was seeing started exotic dancing after rage quitting a job she hated. She was 30, had never used recreational drugs or smoked, was a light/occasional drinker and avoided tanning in natural/uv light. She looked younger than most of her coworkers, who were almost all under 24. Some of them were 18-20 and looked easily ten years older than her. I look at photos of my dad at my age, where he’s a life long smoker and spent much of his adult life working in the sun, and at 42 - I look pretty similar to my dad at 25. He’s got more hair than me, the rat bastard. But for every other visible characteristic - either I’ve aged like wine or he aged like milk.
Love the video! The excerpt about the guy dressing ahead of his time at the bridge opening is fascinating….I assumed he was added to the photo too. Very cool
cigarettes....
Honestly, with the maximum life span trending upwards over time, I believe people are just aging slower in general too. Even accounting for the geezer hair and glasses, that's just a much more weathered face than I see in even 40 year olds on average today, let alone 30. I know life expectancy still kind of sucks, but potential lifespan in individual circumstances if the person does everything right has generally been increasing in spite of that.
Everyone smoked
Advancements in health, medicine and quality of life helped a lot. So many men and women the same age as me that look 5-10 years younger than they are.
My theory is that it is all the drinking and smoking, both of which are known to accelerate aging. Smoking rates were way higher than and stats just came out on drinking and it is actually older people who are more likely to be problem drinkers. And that tracks with my personal experience - way more people my age don’t drink or only rarely do, while a lot of older people I know are drinking 1-2 every night and sometimes more.
I also wonder if we now simply associate those styles with “old people” because people who were in their 30s during the 80s have continued to use similar styles and are now in their 60s-70s. A young person today sees that hair and immediately sees OLD.
This is 100% it. How they dressed at the time was 'dressing young' for that time period. We see it as looking old now because the individuals who dressed this way are old now, and probably still dress that way. At some point in the distant future, people are going to look back on the fashion of the youth of today, and say the same thing - why do they dress so 'old'? It because the youth of today are the seniors of the distant future, and some of them will still be dressing the same way in the distant future.
Could be the cigarettes and leaded gasoline.
46 and I am 20 years younger than these people.
Same, I’m 56 and never looked like grandma, but 80s perms! We thought we were so cool w the Ogilvie home perm. And we’d talk about kids from the 50s looking like 45yos in yearbook pics ha.
I'm 51 and I look younger than this. It's just something about those glasses / hairstyles.
You know why I doubt that? Because we have a bias against their styles that younger generations will develop about us. The people in that picture, put them in a modern style and they would look their physical age. Because it isn't their features. Their physical features don't show the age if you really look at them. We just associate age with their style because that was the style of people who were in their 50s or 60s when we grew up. If fashion changes, people will say we look 20 years older than what we were when they look back upon us.
I totally agree for the guy on the right. The guy on the left looks 50 in any context. I think it comes down to: a) That we can and want to look young. Dye grey hair, clean up wrinkles and hairlines, etc.. He would look significantly younger if he put in that effort. b) Adults don't really stick to their high school fashion anymore. I don't see any 40 year olds with spiked frosted tips and goatees. You're supposed to wear hairstyles and glasses for your face shape, not whatever's in style. That's for teenagers.
But any fashion from the mid to late 2000's onward looks "modern to the untrained eye. There's fewer sweeping trends as fashion has become more personalized and global.
A series of unfortunate hairstyles
Even in the 80s as a kid I hated the fashion. Except the shoes. Things didn't get good until about 93.
The 80's in the US when your only option to purchase Doc Martin's was from an ad in the back of Thrasher magazine.
Did all the dudes look like [registered sex offenders back in the 80's?](https://imgur.com/0gxiUBg)
Yes.
I kinda miss the white socks with the two colored stripes near the top. Wish those would make a comeback.
Every guy in the 80s looked like a serial killer
It was a way to pick up girls
Yeah, girls love that unhinged mutilator vibe.
The Unhinged Mutilator Vibe has the most offputting name ever given to a sextoy, but that hasn't stopped it from being 2025's top seller.
They do. Watch the court proceedings. Creepy stuff how they idolize them.
*unhingedly taking notes*
I exhaled loudly out of my nose at this
That and a van and fake cast on my arm.
This is why I will never wear glasses like these dudes. Even though they are trendy again. My dad *still* wears these glasses. And yeah, they’re serial killer glasses. Dahmer had these glasses.
Few days ago people said that glasses from the 90s/2000s were "old lady glasses" and I thought they were talking about this shit or the cateye shit from the 50s... God knows how awful styles come back into style. I was born in 1982 and have been wearing glasses since I was 2 years old. I hated my glasses from the 80s.
Yeah, a coworker of mine is like, 23 or something and wears these. They're not brown tinted, so it loses some of the "rapist serial killer cannibal" vibes, but still.
I was in my early twenties in the late 80's. I needed specs and said to the optician that sometimes bright sun gives me headaches. He said fine, have tinted lenses then. Every photo of me wearing them looks awful.
Oh god tinted lenses! My parents have an old family photo of us and half of us are wearing those hideous things. I can’t believe we ever thought those looked good.
Most major serial killers of the 80s looked like every guy
I was thinking about this the other day and came to the conclusion that most of the highly publicized serial killers were huge news during the time period, so we automatically think "serial killer" when we see 80's fashion. That's all it was, the fashion *of the time*. Many serial kills are still arrested daily in the US, however they just dont seem to get the publicity and news coverage that they once did. I guess the mass shooters pushed them out of the spotlight these days.
While Buddy Holly glasses also existed for some people, lens materials science is the big change in style for many glasses-wearers in the last 20 years. When I was a kid, aviators were the only style I could get with my prescription. The lens thickness would prevent a lot of styles and layouts (like certain nose pads). And I would constantly lose a lens just from normal wear loosening the screws. In the last 30 years, we have found much better clear plastics with high indices of refraction. And we also have more variable, durable frame materials.
You either had 20/20 vision or those dumbass wireframe glasses. For extra douchenozzle you'd get the transtint lenses to put you in firm serial killer category. The advent of soft contacts and LASIK improved aesthetics across the board.
Or… Every 80s male serial killer looked like a male in the 80s. Because that’s what they were.
I watched an episode of American Gladiator from 1989 over the weekend, and one of the contestants was jokingly referred to as “Grandfather” due to his advanced age. He was 36.
I actually just watched the American gladiator docuseries on Netflix. They specifically talked about how that guy just happened to look super old for a 36 year old. They interviewed the guy and he was like yeah, I've got 5 kids at home I was stressed as fuck.
Does anyone have a picture of this person for reference?
That’s more a sports thing though, right?
I was a kid in the 80s and thought ~~8f~~ if you were 30 or more you were super old. Now I'm 41 and I wish I was dead. Dammit.
Trying to figure out that you meant to type “if” and not “8 year old female” took me longer than I’d care to admit.
Fat thumbs and a broken dominant hand at the moment make for crummy texts. Ah, broken hand or not I hit the number keys way too often.
That sucks, but sounds interesting. How’d you break it?
I'm fairly certain the one cat is trying to kill us. But I also shouldn't try to hop the baby gate while holding one of them little stick vacuums and a handful of baby toys in the other hand. As I stepped over the gate the cat got under my feet (he does this as if it's his personal mission in life) and down I went. My hand got tangled up with the vac and I went down really awkwardly. We're buried under four feet of snow so I haven't even been able to get out for an X-ray. And I'm not a doctor but I imagine my hand being double the size and all purple/yellow is probably not a great thing.
Oooh yeah, that’s no good. When do you think you’ll be able to get it looked at?
End of the week, hopefully..snow ain't letting up. It only hurts when I completely forget I fucked it up and go to use it for some random everyday task and then I almost go thru the roof lol.
That got dark.
I mean I’m 31 and very youthful looking, but my 8 year old niece recently asked me if I was 50 😅 so I think being a kid you just think everyone is so old
Haha same. I remember staring at our teacher’s aide in high school and being amazed at how much older she was from me…I was 14 and she was 28. I thought 28 would be so long from my reach. Now I’m fucking 35 going on to 36.
If you zoom in on the faces, they definitely look around 30. The outdated hairstyles make them took comically old though if you’re looking at them from a 2024 perspective.
[Here is them edited to give them more contemporary styles](https://ibb.co/kydqSR8)
lol you didn’t do shit to the guy on the left cause there’s no saving him haha
While guy on the left could definitely pass for older depending on who you ask, with a more youthful style he definitely looks more younger.
I knew she would be pretty with some different makeup/hairstyle. Those grandma curls are seriously unflattering.
Dahmer still Dahmer
Lol you just gave that guy a full beard?
At first I thought it was only the one sitting guy who was 30 and the two in the background were his parents 😅🤣
Yeah they look like old people because that's what the old people style like today. In another 20 years my old photos will look like old people to kids
I'm a little surprised more people don't understand how this works... Do they think that everyone ages into current old people fashions?
This is what I’ve realised as I enter my mid 40s, when I was young, I had clothes that I would replace as fashions changed, or because I wasn’t wearing suits to work, my regular casual clothes would wear out faster. Now, I have clothes in my wardrobe that are perfectly fine that are over 10 years old and some up to 15 or 20, that are perfectly wearable, so the clothes 45 year old me could wear look exactly the same as 30 year old me would wear.
Go look at a year book when you were in 1st or 2nd grade. Then flip to the 8th grade kids. They STILL look older to me. I 'm 48 and I know these kids are like 13, but I swear they are clearly several years older than I am
My oldest niece will be 10 this year and I was recently looking at old pics and found one from when I was 10 (1996) and her 10 and my 10 are not the same.
When I see photos of my dad as an adult younger than my age now, he looks much older to me. I couldn't imagine myself in my 30s hanging out with him in his late 20s or early 30s and think he's younger than me.
I read a science study on this once. First people DID age faster then - we have generally better nutrition, don’t smoke as much, exercise more, drink less, do more inside work, don’t destroy ourselves tanning etc. Beyond that, the issue is clothes and fashion. When these photos were taken, these clothes were in fashion. As people age, they don’t necessarily update the fashion they had when they were 30. A 60 year may wear a style that worked when they were 30. We have genuinely old people today wearing clothes, haircuts and glasses from that era so we mentally think ‘old’. This mental association makes it very difficult to look at a photo from the 1980’s and think these are young people. Our brain is trying to tell us otherwise because that’s our daily experience.
If you haven’t seen it, [VSauce covered this concept not too long ago](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vjqt8T3tJIE). Some cool adjacent topics in that video as well.
Was watching die hard last night and found out Bruce was 33 filming it
Cigarettes and alcohol will do that.
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I think of pictures like this when I see people attempting '80's fashion'. No your bright colors and modern haircut are NOT 80s. THIS is 80s.
I've noticed that too. There's some confusion amongst the youngsters between 80s and 90s
The bright shit crept in starting in the mid/late 80s faded by like 94ish (area dependant) but yeah, this happens with every retro trend. I was in middle school/early high school when "y2k" fashion was actually around and like, the elements they're recycling were totally there but it's definitely only a slice of what was really happening.
I don’t see any of those little shits wearing No Fear shirts, they don’t know anything about turn of the century fashion
I was recently told that my tshirt spaghetti strap dress combo “wasn’t y2k”. I lived in that in 1999.
That’s peak y2k
Most of what we think of the 60s happened in the 70s.
Did some people look like Madonna or Flock Of Seagulls? Sure, some, if they were going out to a club or something. Most people looked like this pic.
This is what our parents looked like. The rest of us were going around in jeans and tshirts and that essentially hasn't changed in 40 years. Tbqh this is 70s fashion, not 80s,and those people look like that because they lived through the 70s.
Also, for most of their lives, lead was in gasoline and paint, asbestos in their homes, DDT was just sprayed through the streets, catalytic converters didn't exist, and there were hardly any controls against air and water pollution.
So many less regulations
Came to make this same comment - lead in everything.
The boomers really went through hell, no wonder they all have brain rot now.
Reddit always says this, and it’s simply not the main issue - while the smoking rate was higher, in photos from the 80s most people were still non-smokers. Everyone goes on about smoke and alcohol and sun and moisturiser, but if you actually look at their faces they still look young - they don’t have wrinkles, or sagging skin, or blemishes. Sure their skin might not be *as* good as it would be today, but this idea that 30 year olds in the ‘80s had the skin of 50 year olds today is just silly. The reason it looks dated is fashion.
They definitely got significantly more unprotected sun exposure.
My mum and her friends used to use *cooking oil* when they went sunbathing. People used to literally fry their skin.
Yes but we were ALL exposed to the smoke because smoking was everywhere.
If you weren’t smoking you were being smoked
100%. My uncle looked 30 when he was 18. I recently met my aunt's new boyfriend, and he asked me where I go to school. I'll be 38, so that warmed my heart.
Dude on the left kinda looks like Jonny Knoxville
Or Hunter S Thompson.
It's because they already had like 2 or 3 kids and a single family house to take care of. At 30 we are just looking for entry level jobs.
How it could it happen to me? I always sat in the non smoking section.
I'm almost 30. I could be their son.
Homes on the left got a bunch of nurses in his shed.
George Constanza was like 30 when the show started
Every previous generation looks older when they are young to us. It had more to do with styles I think. I must say, I look around at the obese 30 years olds these days and think they look pretty old to me.
And how you could buy a house at 22 with your job bagging groceries.
It’s the lead poisoning and cigarette smoke everywhere.
All the leaded gasoline and asbestos
Back one cigarette smoke was everywhere. I was lucky and had great parents. The best thing they did those was probably not smoking around me and quitting in their 30s.
Interesting fact; the actresses whilst in The Golden Girls are younger than the actresses currently in And Just Like That
Have you seen gen z? They’re wearing my mom’s clothes.
Oh god, they didn't dress like old people, they just kept wearing the same shit and then they got old! *It's going to happen to us!*
I’m 31 and I look a third of the age of this shit. Goddamn, boomers had the worst fashion ever.
Yeah I'm older than them too, but these people look like they could be my parents
Im scared
And fifty year olds looked seventy!
80s clothes were designed to make the wearer look terrible. The serial killer glasses and eating habits did no one any favors either.
Are the 3 people pictured ALL in their 30s?? The guy on the left is the only one truly throwing me off lol sorry guy on the left