Or is everyone better looking these days?

[Wishfulmakeupping]

I'm talking about regular people not film stars etc (I would say the opposite there)

Anyway scrolling through my facebook (I know I know!) I thought to myself a lot of people I know are unusually good looking and beautiful. Probably more so than in real life.
Is this just fakery? There is a lot of tan and lashes going on
Or good selfie techniques?
Not sure but suddenly everyone's become a 10 (I'm a solid 5 still) whats going on?!

Agree that styling and grooming products are cheaper and more available. Ditto beauty treatments: when I was a kid only "posh people" visited a salon for nails, hairstyling, eyebrow plucking, waxing etc (brought up in a fairly run down industrial town in south west). Now it seems everyday to pay for beauty treatments.
Fashionable clothes are relatively cheap, I had to save up a months wages from my Saturday job to buy a pair of jeans.
Also don't forget that if you are going by Facebook photo, digital cameras make it easy to get the perfect shot compared with film cameras where you had to wait weeks and pay £ for developing before you find out that you looked completely ridiculous! No deleting awful pics either!

I never once recognised any of DS1's local friends from their online photographs. I'd been apprehensive about how glamorous they all looked, and wondered what on earth they might have in common with my inherently nonconformist child.
Online personas aside, I'm inclined to think the main differences are straighter teeth and hair. My teenage photos look bloody amazing, as long as you weed out the bad hair and wonky smile ones.

pre digital photography and smartphones it was very ?hard to get a good flattering photo of yourself.
Most people will post online only the best photos and have gotten better at taking them not to mention various techniques for enhancing photos.

Online people are better looking but out on the streets I'm not sure if that's the case?

Better diet, better acess to and knowledge of make up and skin care. More flattering and sophisticated hair dyes and make up colours. More knowledge re fitness and health in general. No suprise really. Also these days, 3 spots and they are off to Dr. (Embarrassing Teenage Bodies the other night, she had about 4 spots and was saying my acne ruins my life)! I was covered in acne and told to get on with it (spot creams back then were nigh on useless until Oxy 5 which was so strong it bleached bed linen and your nighty!).

I think a lot of the beauty we see nowadays is very superficial. It's more to do with good make up, highlights and fake tans, than great bone structure, beautiful eyes and healthy complexions.

Know what you mean OP, but I don't think I'd describe people as more beautiful, exactly - more glamorous, perhaps, or polished?

People do seem to look better groomed these days. I think it's partly because, as others have said, there's a wider range of cheap, accessible beauty products, and people are spending time, money and effort on looking good. Because of the internet, there's also way more beauty-related stuff out there - endless articles about celebrities' preferred products/grooming habits; beauty bloggers; forums like this one to discuss style and beauty. There's a massive media obsession with how people look, and I think many have responded to this by making more of an effort. (In my day we had to resort to Mizz and Just 17 for our beauty tips!)

We're also getting more obsessed with clued up about our looks at a much younger age. I work in primary schools, and each year we send a cohort of fresh-faced, innocent-looking Year 6 girls off to secondary school. Almost inevitably, when they return to visit us six months or so later they've adopted the generic 'teen clone' look - permatan, spider eyelashes and straight highlighted blonde hair. Many of them are utterly transformed from how staff remembered them . There's a 14-year-old I know quite well (taught her a few years back and parents are in my social circle) who literally looks about 35 in photos. This seems to be a strangely British thing - DP and I were in France and Italy this summer and the teenagers there somehow managed to look stylish without caked-on make-up and overdone hairstyles (and they didn't all look the same).

I'm not even that old (34), but when I look back at photos of myself and my friends from the '90s I'm shocked by how much younger and more scruffy wholesome we looked compared to teenagers today (this was the grunge era, though, so I guess no make-up and scruffy hair was kind of the point!) As much as the invention of things like GHDs has been a lifesaver for me (my coarse, frizzy hair was the bane of my teenage years), I do feel a bit sorry for younger people today for not having the freedom to experiment and find a look that suits them - I look back fondly on my teenage encounters with Sun-In and glitter eyeshadow!

Oh, and most of the photos I see on FB have been instagrammed to death. Many of the (especially younger) people I know look nothing like their profile picture.

We used to use vinegar or lemon juice to make our hair shine, and try and sneak on a bit of lip gloss when leaving school in the evening. That was as close to glamorous as we got

i think it's fashionable to take care of your appearance and be vain, in a way it wasn't in the 90s. It's ok to be 'high maintenance' now, it's not an insult.

As someone said up thread about photos of woman in the 40s and 50s, it was in fashion to wear fitted clothing and have your hair done, so woman did and looked elegant. It's actually easy to make most people look good if elegance or a high maintanence 'wag' look is in fashion, it's really hard to do that with a 90s waif 'not caring' fashion, then you are sort of reliant on genes.

Plus better diets, cleansing products and medical help have reduced the amount of bad skin you see.

I give it another 10 years and the 'high maintenance' thing will just be to "mumsy". We'll have another generation who look like shit.

I think Temps has it, it's polished - girls and young woman look polished and groomed.

I know what you mean . . . .but I would phrase it more that people have got more glam, rather than prettier. It occurred to me recently that a whole group of glam mums at the school gate had exactly the same 'glam' hair . . . and that I couldn't quite identify which colour it really was. That kind of light brown with honey highlights and a few really blond streaks. Like J-Low's hair. Is it blond, or brunette, it's a sort of in between colour. Then I noticed this hair was really prevalent, including amongst groups of teenage girls. The thing is, it looks super glossy and lovely but I find it a bit boring because everyone looks the same and frankly I like to see some dark brunettes, stunning red heads, platinum blonds etc about the place - people who don't mind standing out and who aren't afraid to move away from the generic 'glam' look.

Nah it's yous eyesight babes

YY to vintagejazz and superficial beauty. It's all about looking glossy now, and I think we've lost a sense of subtle elegance and 'mystique', if that makes sense. I think some of the grooming stuff is great, e.g. better skin and teeth, and I definitely wouldn't uninvent GHDs! But the current ultra-polished look just seems so all-consuming and conformist - I just think of all the other stuff these girls could be doing instead of applying fake tan and waxing themselves to within an inch of their lives.

This probably makes me sound ancient, but there is so little individuality now. Virtually every teenager I know who can realistically achieve blonde hair HAS blonde hair, because it's seen as desirable. In my day (now I really do sound ancient!) no one cared less whether you were blonde or brunette or whatever - yes, there was people who were deemed to be 'prettier' than others, but these judgements had nothing to do with a specific 'look' that had been dictated by celebrity culture and the beauty industry.

And I like a flattering Instagram filter as much as the next person, but I fail to see the point of putting a photo on Facebook that looks absolutely nothing like the person in it! Hope there's a cultural shift soon and we manage to find a bit of balance.

My parents looked middle aged in their thirties. It's weird. My dad's no longer with us but my mum looks better than ever in her seventies. I think it was the clothes of the time plus that funny Queen Elizabeth hair they had back then in rural England in the sixties. Mary Quant never reached the godforsaken parts of Zummerzet, arf.

I don't think people are 'better looking' per se, they are better groomed and more stylishly presenting themselves. Also with selfies you can delete crap photos and choose the one where you look your absolute best.
I work in schools and I haven't noticed teens looking that different, just more heavily made-up.

Really? You could have fooled me, most of the people who come through the tills where I work are no oil paintings TBF.

The supermodels of my youth were just stunning, Cindy, Linda, Christina etc but now they just look 'odd'. The likes of Cara, that ginger one and the Jagger with the gap teeth one just don't look as if they're worthy of the title.

I think it's actually really positive that people now feel able to make the most of what they have. The products available are much more effective,more widely available and overall cheaper. For hundreds of years people have followed fashions and to be honest I cant see from old family photo's that there was such a dramatically difference in people bucking trends. I know exactly what era each photo comes from just by the clothes and hairstyles. My dm's friends all had bubble perms, Deirdre Barlow glasses and wore rara skirts, lycra leotards and shellsuits depending on the occasion. Plus they all thought they looked like the kippers knickers because they were fashionable and on trend. The trends we see these days will move on to something else, but I think its a good thing that more people can afford trendy clothes and feel empowered to improve their self confidence by altering the way they look.

On the down side, there are a lot more young people who are fat these days.

The downside of all this is the pressure to look like that. For that reason, and because it is so incredibly conformist (hardly any different hair colours, styles of dress) I think it's not a good thing, much nicer to care less, have shorter hair and go around in a cardi like most of my contemporaries in the 80's.

I agree. And this applies to 30 and 40somethings as well as teens.

If everyone is spending time and money on doing their hair, eyebrows, nails, tan, then suddenly you have to do these things too, or else you look worse by comparison. Whereas before everyone did them you'd have looked normal.

All this grooming has raised the bar in terms of what "normal" looks like, and I don't like it. And I don't think it has made women any happier with their appearance than they were a few decades ago. Only the beauty industry has really benefited.

Like a previous poster I also work in a University that attracts a wealthier crowd (wonder if it's the same one?!) and was thinking the same thing today as I was walking around.

Most of the girls have beautiful figures and hair, it is very rare to see an overweight girl.

I am 33 and can see the difference in their young skin and mine. It's something I've only recently noticed, I guess that you don't appreciate it when you have it.

I go to the local salon to get my eyebrows waxed and they are all in there having sunbeds and manicures etc in a way that I never was at their age.

Wingandstring - it's a dark blonde/light brown, with highlights. It's actually not far off the natural look for most white British woman, it's how my hair goes in the sun, but minus the greys. The very obviously fake colours are out of fashion for most woman at the moment, which is kind of handy, because you can miss a hair appointment without looking god awful, but I guess the trend is due a flip.

Most of te woman dropping off at ds's school have shoulder length or longer hair, which needs a lot of looking after once you're over 25 and can't do "artfully dishevelled" without shedloads of money well, I think it's an avoidance of the sensible "mum bob" a generation before got, when you hit your 30s and had dcs you cut your hair short.

I'm not sure that people are more attractive. Women / girls are certainly spending more time / money on their appearances. I think people want to be "camera ready" all the time, because of FB etc. and the fashionable look is a very groomed one. If one equates attractiveness with being groomed, then yes, they're more attractive.

Photo filters are kind to faces.

Clothes are also made to flatter different body types now too. There's advice all over the internet to dress in the most flattering way.

There's also make up tutorials everywhere.

The knowledge is just there to look fabulous day to day if you have the time and dedication.

Thinking about it I think years ago we had to rely on our natural looks without the things they have these days. Many of today's teens would look quite ordinary if they didn't have what they have now to look good.