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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46202
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

As Secespitus says -- and I upvoted his answer -- if you delay describing a character, then the reader forms a mental image, and then later you break it and it's very disconcerting. The reader now has to go back in his mind and re-imagine the whole story up to this point.

If something about the character never becomes relevant to the story, you can just not mention it. In general, the reader will either imagine the character as being like himself, or as being what he thinks of as typical for the setting. Like if the story is set in China, I'll likely assume that all the characters look Chinese unless you tell me otherwise.

Or if the point is trivial the reader may never even think about it. If you don't tell me what moles the character has on his body, I probably will not think about it for a moment.

I think the most crucial point is, If something about the character turns out to be important, mention it BEFORE it becomes important. Especially if it's something that others would likely have noticed. Like if in chapter 24 there's a crucial scene where the heroine is mistaken for a man because she is bald and stocky, and you've never mentioned these things about her before, I was probably viewing her in my mind as having long hair and at least generally "girl-shaped". Not only does this overturn how I've imagined the whole story up to this point, but it also has the danger of looking like a cheap trick. At this point in the story you suddenly needed there to be some confusion about her identify, and so without warning you introduce information that all the characters would have known, but that you never shared with the reader. Like you didn't know how to advance the story at this point so you just suddenly made up something jarring.

Original score: 6