“You look great for your age!”

A seemingly innocent compliment that’s woven with unintentional, casual ageism. Yes, you do look great. But why only for the number of candles on your last birthday cake?

Despite leaps and bounds being made to embrace the realities of getting older, ageism is still prevalent in the UK. And according to new research from the charity Centre for Ageing Better, over half of people aged 50+ believe the depiction of older people in the media and advertising is partly to blame, thanks to the negative stereotypes that do not reflect their lives.

“How we’re represented matters,” says Dr Carole Easton OBE, chief executive at the Centre for Ageing Better. “Some groups of older people are barely represented at all. These stereotypes make a difference to how society sees, thinks about and values people as they age.”

Age discrimination is the most common form of reported workplace discrimination, with one in three people in the UK reporting to have experienced age prejudice or age discrimination at some point. And ageism can come in many forms. 

In extreme forms it could be refusing to hire someone over or under a certain age, asking for someone’s age at a job interview despite its irrelevance or enacting policies that unfairly privilege one age group over the other.

There are also more nuanced forms of ageism – viewing older people as ‘out of touch’, ‘stuck in their ways’ or ‘terrible at technology’, while younger people may be stereotyped as ‘unskilled’, ‘lazy’ or ‘untrustworthy’.

And then there are all those tiny snippets of everyday ageism that you might not even think about – backhanded compliments, off-the-cuff remarks and even inward reflections.

For example, how many times have you dreaded your upcoming birthday? Or how many times have you worried about a grey hair or a wrinkle? Or perhaps you didn’t think to invite Louise from accounts to the after-work drinks because she wasn’t part of the younger crowd? 

“In my last job, most of the staff were all a lot younger than me,” says Stylist reader Sarah, 42, a healthcare worker from Suffolk. “I remember one time on someone’s birthday I was the only one in the team who didn’t get invited to the party because it was at a nightclub and it ‘probably wouldn’t be my thing’.”

“I probably wouldn’t have gone,” she admitted. “But it would have still been nice to have been asked. It made me feel so old and past it.”

Someone who recently acknowledged her own internalised ageism is Jacqueline Hooton, 61, a fitness tutor and writer, who champions and embraces ageing to her 500,000+ community on her Instagram account (@hergardengym). She recently posted about never using the phrase ‘years young’ again. 

“At some point, I switched over from describing my age as ‘… years old’ to ‘… years young”, she wrote. “I didn’t realise by doing so I was merely reinforcing the idea that being ‘old’ is the worst thing you can be and has negative associations.

“I thought it was a more empowering message to say however many years young,” she told Stylist when we caught up with her over the phone. “But in the last few years, I’ve reassessed that and thought, hold on a minute, I’m really challenging ageism and the issues around ageism, but by holding on to that word ‘young’ and refusing to use the word ‘old’, I’m just creating more of a problem around that.”

“I felt that it was just disingenuous to promote a pro-ageing attitude and then keep describing an age as young. I understand the people who still use that description because they’re just trying to make the point that we’re not, you know, it’s a chronological number, it might not align with how we feel or what we can do or how we live our lives.”

This is why the Centre for Ageing Better has launched its first campaign, Age Without Limits, that aims to change the way we all think about ageing. As part of this, they’ve launched a photography exhibition, Challenging Ageism: See And Be Seen.  

Mindy Meleyal, a volunteer gardener and belly dancer from Manchester, is one of the participants in the project. “I wanted to be part of the project because it really matters. Representation matters: we need to see people in order to know what is possible,” she says. “Younger people need to be looking forward to this. Older people need to see a truer reflection of themselves.”

“We don’t want to just see images of weak, crinkly old people being miserable and vulnerable. We want to see people being vibrant, funny, experienced, skilled and out there living life to the full. That is equally true of older people’s experience and yet is much less frequently shown.”

Images: Centre for Ageing Better