When should you start anti-ageing treatment?

This question gets asked constantly, and the answer that gets given constantly — "start in your late twenties, prevention is better than cure" — is being used to sell injectables to people who do not need them.

Prevention genuinely is better than correction. But what actually needs preventing is not what most clinics suggest.

What is worth doing in your late twenties and thirties

Photoprotection, taken seriously. If you do nothing else, do this. Ultraviolet exposure accounts for the large majority of visible skin ageing, and in North India the exposure is substantial for most of the year. A broad-spectrum SPF applied every morning, regardless of plans or weather, will do more for how you look at fifty than every injectable combined.

A short, consistent topical routine. A retinoid, a vitamin C, a moisturiser that suits you. Three products used consistently beat eleven used sporadically, and most routines we review are far too complicated to sustain.

Skin quality work, occasionally. Skin boosters, gentle resurfacing, a medical facial rhythm. These improve how light behaves on your skin without changing its shape, and they are extremely low risk.

What can usually wait

Filler. Volume loss is a structural change that generally becomes relevant in the forties. Placing filler in a face that has not lost volume adds volume it did not have — which is precisely the look most people are trying to avoid.

Routine neuromodulator in your twenties. If there is no line visible when your face is at rest, there is nothing to prevent yet. Once a dynamic line begins to persist after you stop making the expression, that is the moment it becomes a reasonable conversation. For most people that is the early to mid thirties.

The uncomfortable part

Sleep, alcohol, smoking and stress affect how you age more than any treatment we can offer, and considerably more than anyone selling treatments would like to acknowledge. We raise it at consultations not to lecture, but because recommending a course of collagen stimulation to someone sleeping five hours a night is treating the wrong thing.

So: when?

Photoprotection and a sensible routine: now, at any age. Skin quality treatments: from the early thirties, when they suit you. Neuromodulator: when a line persists at rest. Structural work: when structure has actually changed — usually the forties.

Anyone recommending significantly more than that to someone in their twenties is selling rather than advising.