Maybe it’s something you wondered about during a recent trip to the DMV — it was certainly something a social media user who was thumbing through an old yearbook questioned: are people nowadays uglier than people used to be?
At least according to Shafee Hassan, the founder of Sydney, Australia’s, facial aesthetics consultancy firm QOVES, the person who made the seemingly catty query was actually onto something.
On a YouTube short, Hassan reiterated the person’s question, explaining there are “many theories.” But in his opinion, it comes down to the “functional matrix hypothesis” — meaning our faces are the result of what forces we put on them.
He contends that back in the day, an upper and a lower jaw were on average stronger looking (yearbook photos allegedly bore out the theory), which made high schoolers appear more mature than they were, and also more attractive.
Nowadays, he says, with poor diets, bad sleep patterns and our habit of constantly stooping over our digital devices, our posture is terrible and we’re getting jowls, a double chin and a weaker jaw far earlier than our analog-only counterparts.
Still, the topic, and his opinions, were divisive, according to comments captured by the Daily Mail. One user blamed iPhones for taking substandard pictures compared to film, which was used in older yearbook pictures. Others claimed the vintage yearbook saw “old-man” haircuts on younger people, which throws off how old we might perceive them to be.
And one snarker noted if one thinks people are always more attractive in older photos, they haven’t seen enough old photos.