There I was in a comfortable chair, dressed nicely (as I wanted to look like the lawyer I was and not whatever it is I’ve become), and a beautiful woman held a mirror up to my face and bid me to look at myself with an objectivity I rarely muster.

She was a doctor, a specialist in plastic eye surgery, and I was a prospective patient. I’d been sent to her by my general practitioner to see if she could remedy the persistent periodic recurrence of what is called blepharitis — inflammation of the eyelid caused by clogged pores and glands. But she was also the sort of doctor that performs surgery around the eyes for purely cosmetic purposes — brow lifts, lid lifts, bag removal — required not for purposes of health but to satisfy vanity.

She herself was quite beautiful, with flawless skin, perfectly dressed under her long white lab coat, in Louboutin heels, not a pore visible, much less out of place or leaking like mine. And she held a mirror up to my face under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the exam room so I could see exactly what was wrong with my eyes. She noted, not unkindly, the thickened upper lids, the folds at their corners, the lines in my forehead that she said were the result of lifting those heavy lids with my brow muscles.

What I was seeing, to my shock, was the face of an old man, and not a particularly well-preserved one at that. I realized in that moment that I never actually look at myself in this objective, assessing way, how adept I’ve become, like most of us, I suspect, in seeing only the bits and pieces of my face that I want to see —the hairline, the chin, the patch of cheekbone, the eye color — never the composite whole, as now, in the doctor’s unforgiving mirror.

There’s a passage in my novel Tell Me Again (coming this December —go order, I’ll wait) where the protagonist has a similar, sudden revelation:

I’m not the man I was even a few years ago, at age seventy, say: a sort of naive, superannuated adolescent, wrapped in sagging skin and shrinking muscle, but basically sound of body and unchanged of mind since I was merely middle-aged. And yet I look and sound in these pages like the man I was, rather than the caricature of that man that I’ve become, all droopy lids and loneliness, forgetful of names and practical details, limping on the knee I blew out at Squaw Valley when I was forty, cursing my aching back the way my father did his when he was old and I was young enough to pity him, fearful that the next unguarded breath or heartbeat could be my last, my body suddenly revealed as a finite vessel, remorselessly wilting away.

There’s a self-imposed gender bias that men, especially those of a certain age, are not supposed to think of themselves in these terms at all, not to be subject to vanity or aspire to greater attractiveness, because, among other things —why? We’re too old for looksmaxxing, we’re well married and gainfully employed (or safely invested); what need have we to submit ourselves to the rigid standards of physical attractiveness that women are saddled with from childhood on?

One of the best articles the Wall Street Journal has published in the last five years was “A 70-Year-Old Man’s Search for Younger-Looking Skin,” in which the author, after what he describes as “the 20th surgery to slice skin cancer off my face,” sets out to try every high-end skin care product in the mostly female cosmetic arsenal to see if they will improve his appearance. He acknowledges right off the bat that men aren’t supposed to care about this: “I grew up believing a guy’s visage should display hard-bitten masculinity, ideally with a scar or two,” but that he “needed to sweep the old prejudices aside to save my own skin.”

He tries $300 face creams, Bakuchiol drops, a niacinamide cream from South Korea that’s supposed to eradicate age spots, serums developed in medical labs for wound victims that have been repurposed to tighten aging skin, and “Rich Cream,” by Augustinus Bader, a ridiculously expensive concoction that becomes his favorite moisturizer. And lo and behold, after thousands of the Wall St. Journal’s dollars and months of his new feminine skin regimen, he does look better in the mirror, and his complexion, formerly graded a “C-minus” by a Kiehl’s technician, now rates an A-minus.

I was inspired by this article not only to overcome my own male bias against female-targeted skin treatments, but to admit that in my current state I looked not “distinguished,” but merely old, that I cared about such things as wrinkles and age spots and didn’t want to have them if they could be avoided. I would no longer persist in the thoroughly guy pretense that vanity was beneath me and looking worn was not only okay, but an emblem of a certain kind of manhood. After all, our nation’s president wears more makeup than a TikTok diva in full-on selfie mode.

It was liberating, but in truth, also a form of denial. Time marches on regardless of the expense or effectiveness of our skin products. Wrinkles and droopy lids win out in the end, and here I was in a surgeon’s office having it proved to me. She’s a surgeon because, in the end, and sometimes well before it, scalpels are needed where creams fail. And at some point even scalpels do no good.

I’m not sure I’ll avail myself of a blepharoplasty, as it’s called. The pretty plastic surgeon is booked up for months, and once the cutting is done, the recovery time seems too long. I’m way too vain for that.

But next time you see me, let me know what you think.