It’s always been difficult for younger people to figure out, simply by looking at someone, just how old an older person really is.
Children are notorious for it. You average seven year old often can’t tell the difference between someone who just became eligible to drink and someone who just became eligible for early social security benefits. Even high schoolers are foggy as to whether someone might be 45, 55, or 65.
This can be a real problem in particular for young, vivacious, bar-hopping adults. How to tell if the charming person in that dimly lit public house is a creepy middle-aged man or a cougar with a den full of pups? These days there’s no guarantee that a twenty-something can suss out a middle aged person simply by giving them the once over. And so 20SomethingMagazine recently asked me, a certified old person (by their count), to offer their readers some advice for spotting borderline fogies the likes of me.
After all, it’s getting harder and harder to know for sure just from a casual glance whether or not s0meone is actually old . Many hard-and-fast generational divides have blurred since the 1980s. Now people of all ages do things that were once strictly the domain of 
the young. Wearing jeans, smoking pot, and driving a small to mid-size import aren’t just for twenty-somethings anymore.
And Mother Time’s markings upon a person, or lack thereof, can also be misleading. Plastic surgery, botox, hair dye (is it just me or is no one gray anymore?), and the like all make it easier than ever to hide the signs of middle age. Meanwhile, smartphones and other instant-info technologies help those who would otherwise be out of the loop, pretend to be hip.
What to do? How can today’s chic, young adults dodge hooking up with someone on the verge of grandparenthood while still maintaining some decorum and not demanding to see a driver’s license? How can they make a quick, snap judgement and avoid the painful task of setting the ultimate trap: luring the suspect into talking about inane baby boom trivia?
One simple trick: The hands.
Nobody shoots botulism into their hands. Nobody pays thousands of dollars to have a surgeon scalpel away those particular wrinkles. And though a manicure may gussy ‘em up a bit, it can’t gloss over all those years of snapping and clapping, working and jerking, of issuing non-verbal words and gesticulating birds. Because while the eyes may be the window to the soul, the hands are the prism through which the years pass.
My dear, gentle twenty-somethings, just look at their damn hands. There’s no hiding it. The wrinkles, the brittle and yellowing finger nails, and maybe even the liver spots. They’ll 
all be there, betraying the truth. Even Dorian Gray kept them in his pockets while posing for that portrait.
So ignore the designer clothes, the dark, coifed hair, the casual allusions to today’s hippest tunes, and all of the other phoney trappings designed to confuse and confound. Old people are like vampires; they’re desperately hoping to live forever by draining the lifeblood of sweet youth from you. Old people are also like vampires in that they’re so 2009.
And now you know how to spot one.
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This post first appeared at 20SomethingMagazine.com