On wthe way male vs female celebrities age in public
I'm 44, and I definitely notice myself watching how people and particularly women age, and trying to notice and push back against a sort of grief that I feel when I notice a celebrity looking older.
A couple years ago, a bunch of 90s models (who are basically exactly my age) were brought back for runway work and editorials, and I realized that 40 year old women were never allowed to smile in editorials, because it would bring out all their wrinkles and also make it hard to airbrush them. This was particularly noticeable with Kate Moss because as a skinny smoker she is noticeably wrinkly, but also because there are so many candids of her where she has a huge wrinkly grin and zero fashion photos of her smiling.
So I think some of why women look younger is because they are forced into a very narrow range of facial features. And also the expectation that they will be wearing professional makeup all the time. Probably also a lot of actresses get very expensive forms of plastic surgery that I as a lay person am not able to recognize.
I’ve been thinking about male celebrity aging with Sebastian Stan in particular. He’s ten years younger than me and I’m an ex smoker and an ex meth user, and he still has more wrinkles on his face than me. My theory is that it is all the rapid weight gain and loss that actors are expected to do, and the incredibly low level of body fat that you have to have for your abs to look like that. I also sort of wonder if steroids are involved
I heard an interview with Stan where the interviewer was congratulating him on aging out of the pretty boy roles, which seemed like a really weird thing to say. And implies that there is a whole spectrum of "serious" roles that are incompatible with being pretty.
For women, the roles they age out of bare almost all of them – I’m sure that a lot of women who were perceived to age badly just disappeared from the public eye.