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A number of works in lexical semantics have emphasised the importance of what Cruse called « facets ». Facets are elements of meaning that refer to subclasses of properties along different dimensions, such as the physical properties of a book as well as its informational properties. Facets have been considered to be crucially involved in quantification and predication, as in Mary read all the books that preferably refers to informational properties as does Mary began to read the book. In this paper, I suggest that the importance of facets has been overestimated. Concerning quantification, I show that the informational facet restriction is a particular case of an overall mechanism of individuation, which reflects general constraints on the distinction of entities. Concerning the French verb commencer (‘to begin’), its distribution depends more on the type of the accommodated predicate than on the meaning of the nominal complement taken in isolation. Although facets play a significant role in interpretation, their function seems to derive from a complex array of constraints, not from intrinsic properties.