Reading your face
Deepened, or moved.
Almost every man says his face has got deeper. Very few have checked whether that is what happened.
Why the distinction matters
Deeper is expected. Everybody is braced for deeper, which is why nobody looks twice at it. A mark in a different place, running at a different angle, is not the story a man is expecting to find, so he tends to file it under deeper and stop looking.
Being precise costs nothing and it is the only useful thing you can do here. This page gives you the words. It does not tell you what any of it means.
Expression, and the other kind
Expression lines run across the movement that made them. Thirty years of the same frown, the same squint, the same laugh, folding the same skin the same way. Most men can place where those came from because they have watched them arrive.
The other kind runs the other way — along a line rather than across a movement. Men cannot usually place those, because nothing they do with their face makes that shape. The common words for them are not creasing words. They are shrinking words: hollow, fallen, gaunt, smaller, tighter, pulled.
This is a way of looking and nothing more. It is not an explanation, a mechanism or a finding, and this site will not tell you what is happening in your own face.
Questions worth answering honestly
- Is the mark you are thinking of deeper than it was, or is it somewhere it never used to be?
- If it has moved, which way — up, down, out towards the ear, in towards the mouth?
- Is it running at a different angle to the one you remember?
- When you were younger, did that mark appear when you did something with your face, or was it just there?
- Is it there in a photograph of you at thirty, or did it arrive later?
- Is the change on both sides, or one?
Photographs are more honest than mirrors, because a mirror shows you the face you arrange. Old photographs are more honest still.
What this page will not do
It will not tell you what any mark is, what caused it, or what happens next. It will not give you anything to do to your face. It will not tell you whether to have a procedure, and it will not have an opinion about how you look.
If you want something identified, that is a job for somebody qualified to look at it, and the safety page covers what should not wait.
Talk it through
The AI guide can help you get the description right, which is harder than it sounds and worth doing once, properly.