The first thing to notice about your own face

There is one useful observation to make about your own face, and only one. It has nothing to do with lines, pores, or complexion.

The observation

Where your face always announces itself first.

Not this week. Always. For as long as you have had a memory of your own face.

For some people, it is the temples. For others, the forehead. For others still, the centre — around the nose, across the cheekbones. Others announce themselves along the jawline. Others at the cheeks and beneath the eyes.

It is almost always the same place, whatever the nature of the signal: shine, dryness, redness, hollowness, congestion.

Why it is the only stable point

Because what a face does changes all the time, and the place where it does it almost never changes.

You can be shiny in June and dry in January. You can have a magnificent complexion one week and a dull one the next. What remains constant over twenty years is the zone.

That is why this observation is worth more than all the others: the others describe states, this one describes a geography.

How to make it properly

Do not look at your face right now. You will see what it is doing today, which is of no interest.

Call on memory. When you were a teenager, where did it happen? When you are tired, where does it show? When you went through a very good period, what improved first?

If the three answers point to the same zone, you are holding something.

What it does not tell you

Careful here, because this is the trap.

Knowing the zone does not tell you what to do. The same zone can announce itself for two opposite reasons: because it produces too much, or because too much has been taken from it and it is compensating.

Those are two situations that call for the opposite of each other, and they look exactly the same. No amount of observation will separate them, because the difference is not visible: it lies in the cause.

What it gives you anyway

A precise question in place of a vague one.

Instead of “what should I use”, you now have: “why is it always there”. That is infinitely more useful, because that question has an answer.

Every face follows a logic, and that logic explains the geography: why it is at the temples for you and at the centre for your sister, when you grew up in the same house with the same water and the same soap.

It can be read one step earlier than the mirror, from the very beginning. And it turns that zone you have always known into information instead of an annoyance.