AbstractWe revisit the foundational Moment Formula proved by Roger Lee fifteen years ago. We show that in the absence of arbitrage, if the underlying stock price at time T admits finite log‐moments for some positive q, the arbitrage‐free growth in the left wing of the implied volatility smile for T is less constrained than Lee's bound. The result is rationalized by a market trading discretely monitored variance swaps wherein the payoff is a function of squared log‐returns, and requires no assumption for the underlying price to admit any negative moment. In this respect, the result can be derived from a model‐independent setup. As a byproduct, we relax the moment assumptions on the stock price to provide a new proof of the notorious Gatheral–Fukasawa formula expressing variance swaps in terms of the implied volatility.