Internet is full of these stories, I believe none. For one, even if there are people who look younger (say, Selena Gomez, or Lucy Liu) even them cannot pass to be 10+ years younger than they are, after looking at them in person. Have you actually met a 30+ year old person who could pass consistently as a teenager? I have never met one. The second thing is that if you are "routinely" told that you look XX or YY years old , either you are going around people telling your actual age, or they are being gracious in their compliment. You dont approach a teenager to tell them that they look young.

I did meet a Taiwanese woman who I thought was a teenager but was actually in her 30s. It could be because I am not asian myself and have difficulty recognising distinctive features of asians, but she said that her friends in Taiwan told her the same all the time.

I’m almost 30 and I know I look like a teen because salespeople who knock on my door ask if my mom is home and flight attendants don’t want to let me sit next to the emergency door (you have to be FIFTEEN for that!). I can buy child tickets to things without a question asked. Of course celebrities don’t really look like teenagers, because they’re meant to look attractive. Real people who look young look like gangly awkward teens :)

These responses happen after people encounter me first, then see my kids come up to join the conversation (in their 20's) getting introduced as my kids, at which point the person I'm talking with realizes I am way older than they thought and they freak out. "Routinely" doesn't mean daily, but it does mean it happens often enough to be a thing.

I've gotten that from time to time. My oldest is turning 22 this year. When people hear that, they do a double take and say, "wow, you're not old enough to have a kid that old," to which I agree. I had her at 15 - a bit young to have a kid that age indeed.

A surprising number of people have taken my comment rather personally.

Well, you know, the way you wrote the comment, it kind of invited us to take it as personal - as applying to ourselves.

My personal experience led to that assumption; I've never guessed anyone's age wrong by 15 years, hence the example. Sorry it hit you the way it did; wasn't my intent.

I don't think we took it "personally" in a way that calls for an apology. I don't think anybody felt accused or anything - just that we are responding literally, noting that some of us are in those circumstances, and aren't reacting the way you said. That's all I meant when I said you invited us to take it personally. I did not at all mean that you gave us grounds for feeling accused or defensive. (But thanks for the non-defensiveness of your reply - this conversation could easily have blown up with you feeling accused by my post, and I would not have known why, because I didn't mean it that way at all - which may mean that I wrote it badly.)