More people using sunscreen and lotion on the regular prevents skin damage. More people are eating healthy, working less physically demanding jobs. Also there's a pretty huge bias with seeing pictures of older people and seeing them as older than they actually look. It has to do with seeing older styles of clothing and how people tend to keep their core styles longer. This makes people in the present see past photos as "older people" regardless of how young the faces look.

Also the microplastics are preserving us from the inside out. We're all deli-wrapped now.

Sunscreen probably has something to do with it.

1. Smoking
2. Smoking
3. Smoking

There are already a lot of good answers but I want to highlight this. Chronic tobacco smoke causes increased aging due to multiple mechanisms. Moreover, environmental tobacco exposure from second hand and third hand smoke prior to the 1990s was MASSIVE. So even if you didn’t smoke you got insane daily exposures to the same chemicals.

I don't see any links to Vsauce's video on this so I'm going to assume every response is wrong. TLDR: Styles become associated with eras and people in those eras become associated with our perception of that age bracket.

Smoking.

The micro plastics sustain me

Why is this?

Smoking.

We're a lot sadder now, so we don't smile much. The lack of smiling saved us from face wrinkles which keeps us looking young.

It is because when you look back to old pictures of people from when they were younger, the people in it have clothing styles and hairstyles that we today associate with older people.

Look up a video on YouTube from VSauce called "Did people used to look older?". They explain this phenomena well.

Because we were 6 in the 80s.

It’s because of the WEF using hormones to turn the frogs gay, obviously.

For me it was the hormone therapy

Perspective. You were a kid in the 80s and they looked way old. Now you're in your 40s and those little whippersnappers look like the babies they are.

Lots of good answers here. Another minor one is Hollywood bias - older male actors got starring roles in romantic films. Random example, Cary Grant was 59 when he played the lead role in Charade opposite Audrey Hepburn who was 34.

Add to that the low quality of TV broadcasts, different styles of filing and lighting in movies, and less subtle use of makeup and people in film and TV from stuff from the 90s back have an other-world quality to them if you look back at that compared to the high definition world were in now. Even older magazines and pictures can be available at lower quality to us on the Internet than at the time, as we don't get to see the true originals but lower quality scans on the Internet compared to modern digital photographic.

It's amazing looking at old film from the 1800s that has been well kept or restored - not just people but the whole world actually looks real unlike what we're used to.

We're so used to looking at history in low definition or the artificiality of old fashioned TV/movie techniques and biases.

Cowboy Bebop came out in 1998.

I had that same beard, hairline, and sunglasses when I turned 30 in 2011

I still do now at 42 honestly, but my facial hair is just less pointy lol

We've finally reached the next stage of evolution

Sunglasses skyrocketed in price while shavers are cheaper than ever before. That's why inflation is a bullshit concept. Price rises in some areas and goes down in others independently

People are aging more slowly than in the past, we have better information on how to take care of ourselves. But there is wide variation when you get older. I will say though, that I still feel really good in my mid 50s, nothing hurts, I am still strong and healthy and think that would have been less usual even just 20 years ago.

Give me 30 year old Jet any day. Dude is the perfect ship mom/dad combo rocking a bald and beard.