Why are all young girl suddenly good looking?

[PodcastFunFair]

I'm 40 in the 90s I was reasonably attractive by 90s standards.
I was a size 12 blond curly hair, outfit deom topshop and put on nice make up with some Charlie perfume.
I look at my nieces all identikit long smooth hair, make up perfectly put on with false eyelashes, tiny sized, super stylish all could be models from their insta accounts as could their mates is everyone better looking these days or better tools?
Do I need a make up tutorial from one of them so I'm not such an old dog 😂

DD13 is a little grunger; she looks just like I did in the 90’s! She wears dark black eyeliner, short green hair and shops exclusively on D-pop and in charity shops. She listens to Hole and Nirvana. I guess it’s just whatever clique the girls end up in.

But l don’t know any young girls like the op post.

My dd is 15. Curly wavy hair, no make up apart from a bit of eyeliner, doesn’t have Instagram. Her friends are the same. They aren’t really interested, none of them follow people. Apart from gamers.

I disagree with GaryLurcher, I don't think it's perception. It has changed.

What happened to individualism?
I'm fairly sure as teenagers we looked similar in style, the Jennifer Anderson hairstyle was everywhere.

Better cheaper products and a greater cheaper array of fashionable disposable clothing available for them, better technology to improve hair etc. Coupled with a far greater pressure to look this way.

So glad I didn't grow up in a social media world and don't for a second envy young girls today. The pressure to "fit in" was bad enough when I was a girl and as a tomboy, never did.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be nowadays constantly being bombarded by what many see as the ideal.

It's little wonder that poor mental health is such a huge and worrying issue for both sexes.

This reminds me of this meme …

@Newnews I definitely don't look like a model but I do wear full makeup i.e. contour/highlight and have salon dyed hair. no surgeries/fillers/botox or inclination to get any, but probably spend more than most older women on makeup. I still haven't gotten a shock despite having a london mortgage (albeit on a 2 bed flat) which I bought with DH 2 years ago at age 27.

Ironically, I think that consumer goods becoming cheaper and rent/buying property becoming so expensive means that we move out/marry/have kids much later. Hence the lucky ones with parental support/good jobs/combination both have more disposable income for discretionary expenses as well as the ability to achieve financial stability. The poor teens who can afford only Primark clothes will never be able to afford to buy their own place or afford kids without being in poverty unless they get a well paid job or live in a cheap area in the north (and these affordable hotspots are also disappearing with 10% rises every year). It is literally impossible in London (and also the SE and an increasing number of places) to buy anything without a good job/financial support from parents/rent free living with parents or ideally a combination of the above. 25% of FTB get money from parents and for Gen Z, it will probably be more like 50%. This doesn't even include people like me and DH who lived with his mum for years. If you included that it will be much much higher. I mean, no matter how much you scrimp, the limit is still 4.5 times income (the crazy 7X income is for people who earn 70k and above which is a decent income for a young person); and no amount of saving on beauty products is going to net you £70k (my deposit); only living with parents/gifts/a good job will get you that. And as for renting, most of the renters in my block earn much more than me, they have to as the rent is pretty high and there are affordability checks. So basically for my generation, its really polatrized; the MC kids are likely to be able to spend as much as they like on botox/fillers/makeup cos mummy and daddy have to help them out anyway irregardless; the poor kids either have to battle the odds to get a good salary (which would allow them to pay for luxuries anyway) or they wouldn't even be able to afford food + heating. There would be an almost non-existent lower middle class for the younger generation.

Internet - tutorials, filters, pornography (looks that emerge from it) and the desire and means to showcase themselves to the world.

Cultural shift towards tolerating very adult looks on young girls.

In the 80s/90s the only people who looked anything like that were the much derided 'Essex Girls' and white stiletto wearers of Liverpool and Newcastle. They were adults in their 20s-40s, not girls at all and they were popularly looked down upon as cheap looking.

No-one in their teens wanted to look like that in the 90s.

Honestly, I think a lot of them look bloody awful. So many are overweight and wear skirts that show their arse cracks, faces as fake as they come, ridiculous filters on photos. It's not attractive. I look at my short, freckly 14 year old, in her oversized joggers and hoodie, and pray that she doesn't follow them.

There's so much fake with the young girls / women it's a wonder the trades description act doesn't summons them for false advertising.
Fake eyelashes, eyebrows, lips, boobs, hair etc.

My preteen dd has always been a trackies/jeans and hoodie girl since she was very little, that’s what she wanted to wear and I soon learned not to buy her dresses. She and her friends do experiment with make up but more for fun, not trying to achieve a “perfect” instagrammable look. And some of them have short hair. Interestingly, the one who “identifies as a boy” and has short hair seems to have inspired a short hair trend without the trans identity - though I’m always aware that my DD could fall prey to that. I think this is because the trans-identified one still hangs out with the same female friends as before and deep down they still see this friend as a girl, so in a weird way the whole thing is helping them to realise they can break with the extreme femininity expectations.

From what I’ve seen I think it might actually have peaked. There was a time when every girl in my DC school had the long smooth hair and dresses/skirts except one very determined tomboy. Now a lot more of them choose trousers and a variety of hairstyles. My DD is horrified by lip fillers and says anyone who does that “contouring” make-up looks daft. She’s still very young but I’m hoping there’s a bit of a backlash and she won’t feel the need to go along with any of that.

I think this look is not a "model" look though. Successful models have a much more natural look. I much prefer minimal make up and no artifice on young women, heavy make-up, false eyelashes etc etc just makes them look so hard and old. And as for the posing on SM, just sad.

There are definitely tribes though, and not necessarily by class. You still have groups of girls, with minimal make-up, short or long wavy hair, glasses, natural, fit looking girls. Both at schools and universities. They just don't stand out as much.

Its interesting so many posters say the young girls nowadays look identical. I mean, this is the most ethnically diverse generation in the UK to date. How is it possible for them to look identikit?

Lol I don't think they look perfect, I think they look like mini--clones, as I'm betting we did with our cheapy stuff years ago lol. I'm another who hates the painted sluggy eyebrows, grim, and the caked on make-up, might be porcelain perfect but on younger girls, I still think it looks cheap!
I loved slapping on the war paint growing up but my daughters embrace their natural look, they play footy and dressing up is a clean tee-shirt and a spray of perfume lol, and I think their confidence without needing all the slap is so much nicer, just wish I'd been more like them growing up! :-)

I have noticed this to an extent. Not so much you get teens but about 16-21 ish, all the young women I know of this age look very similar. Very long straight hair, slim with similar clothing, false eyelashes and lots of makeup.

They are all beautiful but that might be partly perception - their youth shines from them to me.

I'm very, very glad I'm not a teen just now but at the same time I do think wistfully how much of a difference Primark could have made to my life as a teen. I had absolutely no access to fashionable clothes or makeup and would have killed for somewhere like that.

I disagree that this is universal.
I work in a secondary school with sixth form.
The kids look like kids. Like teenagers. A very small handful look a little like you describe, but very little makeup is worn and they look different from one another.
The most noticeable change from my youth is that most of the girls have long straight hair, whereas we had hair of all different lengths and curliness.

I think the kind of young women you tend to see on SM look a bit scary. All the same, all fillers and hair extensions.
I love the TV show Angels of the North and the women in it are fabulously funny, witty, switched on etc, but I'm always a bit saddened by how they're all going for the same look and all have overdone lip filler etc. They don't need it all!

Maybe because as teens, some women who are now mothers felt they were at a disadvantage compared even to peers of the past when it came to makeup, control of their hair, and a general air of poise?

I think some girls are just born this way. In my maternal line, the females are very nice looking, naturally pretty but unfortunately don't have an air of poise . Having an air of poise is in your genes and cannot be learned, I don't think.

Thinking back, at my secondary school the girls were very pretty once they turned 14/15. Even thou objectively I wasn't bad looking I never felt in the same league. The preppy, clever girls did not wear make up only the girls who smoked and hang out with boys at an early age. However the 'pretty' girls spent ages on hair, were really sporty and had expensive preppy clothes.

I was astonished when my dd started secondary school, 2/3 of year 7 girls, many of them just 11 years old were really tall, already had their period either since year 6 or autumn term Y7 and looked like older teenagers, even without any make up. Poor dd only caught up with growth spurt and development in year 9. She hates make up but luckily doesn't need it to look nice.

Ramblings of a tired 50+ probably not helpful .

My DD has shoulder length corkscrew curls and not matter how often I tell her it's gorgeous and that people would kill to have hair like hers, she hates it, because she 'doesn't fit in' with all the other girls who have dead straight long hair. (We've tried to straighten her hair but it only lasts 30 minutes and then the curls bounce back lol).

@GaryLurcher19

Same reason police officers are 'getting younger'.

It's just your perception, exaggerated by the event of social media, the normalisation of unselfconscious posing and digital filters.

It's not though. When I look at my highschool photos we all look like trolls. Driving down the street when the schools have just finished now, some of the girls are stunning.

@TomBradysLeftKneecap

I actually find it really sad that so many teenage girls choose to live life behind a selfie filter. It’s actually tragic how many of their mid 40s Mums do too.

Agreed. I know a 40 year old naturally stunning, has Botox and fillers but never posts a natural photo of herself that isn’t carefully posed and heavily filtered. As you say, it is tragic.

I think that is kind of sad in a way.

Too much emphasis on looks, too much time spent looking 'perfect;; and obsession with social media pics (which involve photoshop/filter to present a so-called perfect image).

Plus they all seem to go for the same look: spray tan, false eyelashes, hair extensions, and full face of make up. A triumph of marketing over individuality.

It would be better if young girls and women focused on their personality, achievements and their own brand of attractiveness rather than wanting to look like a Kardashian clone and filling in businesses' pockets in the process.

Whilst in the 90’s we did do plenty of fast fashion and make up, spending 2+ hours a day on make up with contouring and false eyelashes would have come across as a bit self obsessed and no one had camera phones, I think anyone taking a selfie would have been called a poser.

Polished, self assured .. perhaps. Good looking - not necessarily. Lots of identikit fake looks in my view but then I'm an oldie. Also those that post on SM have access to air brushing and don't necessarily look like that in real life. Lots of young women end up with hang ups because of the pressure from SM and never feel they look good enough. Hate the lip filler look ... ugh.