The advantage of starting earlier

The usual argument for starting early is a poor one: it consists of waving a distant threat in front of someone whose face is doing perfectly well. It is unconvincing and slightly dishonest.

The real argument is different, and it has nothing to do with fear.

What time does to a direction

A difference in direction produces a difference in position that grows with the distance travelled.

At twenty-five, everyone is in roughly the same place, and that is what makes the subject feel abstract: two people heading in opposite directions still look very much alike after six months.

At forty-five, they no longer resemble each other at all. Nothing dramatic happened in between: the distance was simply covered.

That is why the question of direction is infinitely more important early on than the question of intensity. A modest effort in the right direction, begun at twenty-five, beats a considerable effort in the wrong direction begun at the same moment — and the gap widens every year.

What there is not to do at twenty-five

Almost nothing, and that is the most misunderstood point.

There is nothing to correct on a young face that is doing well. The heavy protocols offered at that age are not only useless, they are often counterproductive: they accustom one to a logic of intervention that has no reason to exist, and they use up margins that will be needed later.

What there is to do is ridiculously modest: know which way you are going, and do not do what works against it. Which means, above all, not doing.

The cost of not knowing, at that age

It is a particular one. A young face compensates for everything, and it compensates so well that no feedback is available.

One can therefore, for fifteen years, apply a logic exactly opposite to one’s own without any sign pointing it out. It is even the age when the risk is highest, precisely because nothing delays the visible appearance.

The signal arrives when the compensation runs out — and one then attributes to that moment what belonged to the fifteen previous years.

What remains true if one starts late

Everything, except what has passed.

A change of direction produces the same compounding effect at forty as at twenty-five. It simply acts over a shorter distance, and it does not recover what has been spent.

What does not change, however, is the reasoning: at any age, the most profitable variable is not what one adds, it is the direction in which one is going.

What it asks of you

One piece of information, once, that does not expire.

The logic that governs your face does not change with age: what it produces changes, it does not. That is what allows you to obtain it at twenty-five and still use it at sixty.

It can be read from the very beginning — and it is the only investment in this field whose return increases with the time you have ahead of you.