Studies of marginalized youth in the Islamic Republic of Iran have focused almost exclusively on how structural constraints operate to thwart these young people’s transition to adulthood. There has been comparatively little work that has examined how youth in the lower crests of Iranian society actually cope with these precarious structural conditions. The result has been unbalanced hypotheses that argue that youth become stuck in long stretches of time during which they wait with uncertainty for an autonomous life, all the while neglecting the productive micro quests that youth engage in to resolve this uncertainty. The pursuit of face by low-income youth in Iran speaks to this very issue. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two cities in Iran, I find that through their engagement in this face system, young people create an alternative basis of social differentiation. By following the four moral criteria governing face behavior – autonomy, appearance, work and purity – youth are able to win gains in the social and economic spheres that enable them to incrementally improve their lot in life. These findings reveal how these young people’s daily struggles for maintaining dignity can serve as a powerful basis for moving them ahead in life, a finding that has important consequences for research on youth mobility in the Middle East.