Why Russian men over 40 look so ugly?

For any reasons. One of them - they are taught that beauty is feminine. When the ordinary russian man tries to dress up he could hear from his mother or father smth like "stop dressing up like a girl!". Nice clothes is feminine, nice looking clean face is feminine, sometimes descending to "if you don't drink vodka with me - are you a girl or what?"

Why does this happen? Why, in a country, where, according to Pushkin and Dostoevsky, 200 yrs ago men were spending half of their time in front of the mirror, now they are ashamed to look good?

The answer is Second World War (SWW) and terror of 30-40s. 20 mln died in war, most of them men. 20-30 mln died in Stalin's camps, most of them men. In the early 50s, the number of adult men was 5 times less than number of women. Go to the gks.ru - Russian State Statistics dept web site. Check out gender chart and have a look at 60-70 year olds. So, in market economy terms, the supply for men was very limited so the price raised enormously. Women were making all possible effort to acquire a man. Man, in contrary, were relaxed as the supply of women was excessive, Whatever you do, no matter how you look, you will find your girl.

This attitude was anchored in many generations. Only now, in generation that follows mine (born 1995 and later), I see that men are trying to look better, but still not in quantities required to make the country's young generation look nice.

We are living now face-to-face with other Russian-speaking nations, e.g. Caucasus. And it clearly shows that they were not touched by this gender phenomenon. They always look good, no matter what money they make and where they live. The Armenian guy selling flowers in the public market looks hell of a good compared to the big Land Cruiser driver of early 40s in ugly sport suit and "barsetka" - symbol of post-perestroika times - man's purse - size of woman's purse but shape of a business suitcase. 99% of them are black.

By the way, I could entitle this idea as "why Russian girls are so pretty?". The answer would be the same.