The account
He noticed at twenty-six and did nothing for twenty-four years.
This page is one man's account of his own face. It is not evidence about yours.
Who he is
James Roberts, born in Manchester in February 1976. Nearly twenty years in travel and hospitality recruitment, latterly running a firm of twenty, interviewing and meeting men all over the world. He drank daily from eighteen to forty-five, went into residential treatment in Cheshire in June 2020 for four weeks, and has not drunk since. He moved to Tenerife that December.
He is not a clinician, a therapist, a coach or a physiotherapist. He has no qualification in any of this.
Who you are talking to
I have been in a lot of rooms.
Most of them with other men. Some of them very ordinary, a few of them not ordinary at all. Every one of them taught me how to listen.
- 01
Thousands of men
Nearly twenty years of recruiting, all over the world. Men at the top of their game, men on the way out, and every one in between.
- 02
Unusual housemates
I have shared a home with a man who had done time, and with a journalist who wrote for the Daily Sport and the News of the World. Neither was dull.
- 03
Famous company
I have spent time with a Premier League footballer and a pop star. Same questions, same worries, better shoes.
- 04
Half the planet
I have navigated half the world and never once been punched. Polite and cheeky, in that order.
- 05
Any room, same man
As happy in a trailer as on a stag do. I have seen in the New Year with a prince, and another with a sheikh.
- 06
Other men’s stories
I take inspiration from other people and live a little through them, in a happy and healthy way. Then I make my own judgement.
I can sit with any man, in any room, and be myself. That is what I bring to the conversation.
James Roberts, Tenerife
What he did, and what he left alone
He has a fused spine with compressed, dehydrated fascia that was missed in two countries. He worked on his own body in bits for several years, then properly and for hours a day from his fiftieth birthday on 26 February 2026. It is ongoing and not resolved.
He did not work his face. He paid it almost no attention for fifty years, and in his own account most of his tension was in his face then and still is. The face was last and remains last.
What he observed
- He first noticed ageing in himself at twenty-six.
- He says he did enough, for most of his life, to attract what was achievable.
- His eye bags released first. The lines on his cheeks came after.
- He has two lines on each cheek. They were laughter lines, fixed at roughly ninety degrees. He describes them now as running at nearly a hundred and eighty — moved and turned rather than deepened where they were.
- He describes being able to feel something beneath them. His own word is that it crunches.
- He believes he is more attractive now than he was, and that it is because he is more completed rather than better preserved.
None of that identifies anything, explains anything, or predicts anything for anybody else. It is here so you have language for your own face, not a result to expect.
What he will not claim
He will not claim to know why his lines moved. He will not claim anything reverses. He will not claim the body work caused anything else in his life — things happened in the same years and the arrow is not drawn. And he will not pretend the heat and humidity he lives in are available to you.