When everything is fine and you still wonder

Your face gives you no trouble. And yet a doubt keeps returning — in front of a shop window, after a conversation, in a photograph taken from a three-quarter angle.

That doubt is not irrational. Here is what to do with it.

What you must not do with it

Do not go looking for a problem to justify it.

This is what happens to many people: the doubt goes in search of an object, and it always finds one. You learn to spot things, you look more closely, and you end up seeing flaws on your own face that bothered no one the week before.

A face that is doing well has nothing to correct. Correcting it anyway is the surest way to create the very thing you were looking for.

Why the doubt is still well founded

Because a face in good condition says nothing about the direction it is heading.

This is the point no one explains. A face compensates: as long as it compensates, it looks fine, no matter how you care for it. That is not a sign of healthy functioning — it is a silence.

So today, you may have been moving for years in a direction that does not suit you, without any sign to warn you. And you will only know it the day the compensation runs out — which is too late to be useful information.

Your doubt registers exactly that: the absence of any guarantee.

What sets this doubt apart from worry

Worry looks for a threat. Doubt looks for information.

You can tell them apart by what they produce. Worry pushes you to buy, to add, to do something right now. Doubt, on the other hand, would be perfectly content with an answer.

If you are in the second case, the answer exists, and it involves no purchase.

What provides the answer

Knowing which way your face is going.

It is not a state — states you can already see, and they are fine. It is a direction: what your nature produces, what it loses, what costs it and what nourishes it.

This information has the particular quality of being stable. It depends neither on the season, nor on your age, nor on what you have done so far. It was there before, it will be there after, and it explains what your face has always done.

The right moment

It is now, precisely because everything is fine.

An answer obtained when nothing is wrong acts on all the years that remain. An answer obtained when the signs appear acts on what is left after.

That is the only serious reason to attend to the question today — and it has nothing to do with the fear of growing older.