Older Than They Look

The hair must suck out all of the hormones.^[1]

If she tells you she's 26, and looks 26, she's damn near forty!

—Chris Rock, "No Sex (in the Champagne Room)"^[2]

Sometimes characters look their age. But in this instance, they don't. Whether it was a deliberate artistic choice on the behalf of the creator (usually to make the character more attractive or to legally fulfill a fetish) or something much deeper and linked to their characterization and the plot, this character will be older than they look. Although still within the normal range of the human lifespan (for that setting, anyway), this character will be noticeably younger than their age. Sometimes even improbably younger; it's not unheard of for a seeming teenager to be over the hill chronologically.

This is an extremely common trope in Speculative Fiction, where magic or Applied Phlebotinum can be used to explain the characters appearance being at odds with their age.

When science fiction or fantasy takes this trope to its illogical extreme, it leads to Really Seven Hundred Years Old or a Time Abyss. See also Age Is Relative and Improbable Age. Not to be confused with Older Than They Think. Contrast with Younger Than They Look. If they're just drawn in a way that makes them seem older, it's Artistic Age. When a character is played by a much younger actor, it becomes Hollywood Old unless the difference is justified. When the actor is older than the character they portray, it's Dawson Casting (although the actor themselves may just fit this trope, justifying the Dawson Casting).

Compare Mistaken Age, Age-Inappropriate Dress.

Contrast Animation Anatomy Aging.

Remember, this trope only covers characters who aren't impossibly old, just much older than they look. For characters who are impossibly old, see Really Seven Hundred Years Old and Time Abyss.

Examples of Older Than They Look are listed on these subpages:

Examples of Older Than They Look include:

Fan Works

A fandom example: for a while, it was vaguely popular among Harry Potter fanfiction writers to claim that (a few hours per weekday for a year of) Time Travel had sufficiently aged Hermione that it is no longer squicky to have her paired with Snape. Which is silly on the face of it, since two or three extra hours every weekday for an entire year (without even considering summer vacation) adds up to less than thirty days of additional aging. Not to mention she was petrified in her second year for about the same length of time. That's right folks, she broke even.
Maoimi in Soulless shell is supposed to be seventeen, but her age isn't mentioned until the final chapter and thanks to the hilariously clumsy writing she comes across as being about seven. The MSTing does not let this go un-riffed.

Romsca: (as Maoimi) C'n I 'ave some candy, pwease, nice mister paedophile?

Zigzagged with in Kyon: Big Damn Hero, with Kyon, Mikuru, Kanae, and Yuki aging a year during training every night, but having Yuki de-age them afterwards with added Laser-Guided Amnesia. Then, Kyon time-travels all over the place, running errands for his future self, which makes things more complicated.
The Naruto fanfic Hakumei has a jounin-level villain in her late teens convincingly disguise herself as a 12-year old genin.
With Strings Attached takes place in 1980; when The Beatles are sent on their journey, they are physically (but not mentally) de-aged from the thirty-something men they are into the ages they were when Beatlemania was at its height.
Lady Venus in The Blue Blur of Termina. According to Tatl, despite appearing to be in the human equivalent of her late twenties, she is actually over five hundred years old.

Theater

Older Than Radio: In the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Iolanthe, the hero, aged twenty-five, is caught embracing a woman who is not his fiancée and looks seventeen. She's actually his mother, a fairy, but the other characters think that's a staggeringly improbable cover story. "Her age upon the date of his birth", reasons one, "was minus eight."
In the Distant Finale of Vanities: The Musical, the women are in their late 30's or 40's, but are still "lookin' good", as the closing song in the off-Broadway version says.
Clara in The Light in the Piazza.
Raina Petkoff is 23, but gets mistaken for 17 in Arms and the Man.

Visual Novels

Angie in Shikkoku no Sharnoth looks and acts like a little girl, but she's about the same age as the both Mary and Charlie and is the only one with an actual fiancee.
From Fate/stay night, Saber is about twenty-five years old (i.e. not counting the centuries since King Arthur's death), but fifteen in appearance (when she stopped physically aging). Ilya, looking about ten years old, is actually older than Shirou (who's about seventeen).
- In Saber's case, this actually caused her problems. When her subjects realised she didn't age, they began to call her inhuman, and started saying that she, as a apparently unaging immortal, couldn't possibly understand ordinary humans. This eventually lead to The Battle of Camlann, the fall of Camelot and Saber's death.
- In Fate/Zero, when Ilya actually is around ten, Kiritsugu is worried because her growth is so slow that she only weighs about twenty pounds!
- And apart from these examples, Gilgamesh drank a youth potion in Fate/hollow ataraxia and is walking around in the form of an adorable elementary school aged version of himself.
Every single female in Kanon, AIR, Clannad, etc. It's particularly jarring when we're supposed to believe that characters who look no older than sixteen are mothers and aunts of other characters.
- In Clannad, Akio and Sanae Furukawa look barely older than their daughter, Nagisa. Sanae is often mistaken for Nagisa's older sister in the anime.
Maji De Watashi Ni Koi Shinasai has Token Mini-Moe Mayo, 2-F's Class Representative. Joined by Monshiro Kuki, Hideo's younger sister, in the sequel.
Emi of Katawa Shoujo is short and has a youthful appearance, but is one year older than Hisao and the rest of the girls, having taken a year off of school while relearning how to walk.

Web Original

At the Super-Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, Generator (Jade Sinclair) and Warlocke are both fourteen, but look only ten or eleven. Then there's Headmistress Elizabeth Carson, who looks like a hot movie starlet in her early thirties, but is actually over seventy. And there's at least one teacher there who's Really 700 Years Old: Circe. The Circe.
18-year old Survival of the Fittest character Kimmy Redmond is described as looking about thirteen, which is simply down to physical immaturity rather than anything fantastical. There are also Laeil Burbank, who looks about 16, and Alice Jones, who is commonly mistaken for an elementary school student. A recent addition is V4's Celeste Beaumont, who looks like an under-developed freshman.
This trope is in full force in Deucalion Chronicles - to the point where it's easier to name characters that actually look their age. Almost everyone stops aging after a certain point, thanks to either natural magic or the alchemical solution Ambrosia. Some Outsiders barely age past puberty. The only exceptions are certain religious groups that refuse Ambrosia and non-CU worlds where it is unavailable.
Enrei Islio, 21 in Chaos Fighters II-Chemical Siege is called an 8-year old man due to this trope.
The Nostalgia Critic is 30, but still has the same babyface as he did when he was fourteen.
Similarly, while The Angry Video Game Nerd has definitely aged over the last three or so years, he still looks younger than his actual age (32).

↑ (Read from right to left).
↑ The preceding line is "If a woman tells you she's 20 and looks 16... she's 12".

[1] (Read from right to left).

[2] The preceding line is "If a woman tells you she's 20 and looks 16... she's 12".

[1]

[2]