When I was a kid, my grandmother wore her hair in tight curls with bluing, cat-eye glasses, and stockings rolled to her knees. And dentures. I thought she was ancient, but she was younger then than I am now. It's not your imagination- people did indeed look older in those days. The easiest way to see the effect is in TV shows. You can watch an old episode of All in the Family and assume that Archie Bunker was in his 60s, but actor Carroll O'Conner was in his 40s when portraying him. In the 1984 movie Cocoon, Wilford Brimley played a character in a retirement home, but he was only 49. YouTuber TV Guess-O-Matic goes over some of the main reasons people used to look older. The comparison of Lucille Ball and Jennifer Anniston seems a bit of a stretch, because if you swap the hairstyles, the difference in appearance just disappears. It's the same with The Golden Girls, because their hairstyles made them look much older than they were (and Estelle Getty required plenty of makeup to look old). -via Laughing Squid
Looking back further in my memory, my maternal grandma, who had six kids and rolled her own cigarettes, looked older than everyone and died at 46.
glad I never partook in bad habits of both drinking and smoking
As the video says, exercise would be a big impact, too. My grandparents thought of exercise as weird. It was a new concept and, coming out of the Great Depression, counter-intuitive.