Hold a pen between your pursed lips, as if you were drinking through a straw. Now point the pen up, down, right, and left. Repeat for one minute.
What do you do? Facial yoga. Facial yoga involves massages and exercises that theoretically stimulate the muscles, skin, and lymphatic system of the face. This technique is designed to relax the muscles in your face and help relieve tension. If you think about the effects of Botox, a neurotoxin that partially paralyzes facial muscles, you might assume that relaxing those same muscles would have similar effects.
Stress and worry also make us unconsciously contract the muscles of our face, for example to frown or purse our lips. These contractions can cause wrinkles. For example, smiling is one of the causes of crow’s feet, frowning produces wrinkles between the eyebrows and pursing the lips causes furrows around the mouth. Knowing how to relax the muscles of the face, contracted by facial expressions associated with different sensations, can help alleviate these effects, but let’s not forget that the main cause of wrinkles is aging, both natural aging over time and accelerated skin aging due to smoking or sunburn.
How Face Yoga Works
Face yoga is based on the idea that, like the muscles of the body, the muscles of the face can be exercised and that firm facial muscles help prevent sagging skin. Additionally, practicing these exercises can improve blood circulation, and therefore increase the production of collagen and elastin, and prevent or reduce the appearance of wrinkles and other signs of aging.
While there is little evidence of these benefits, some studies show promising, but modest, results. A 2018 study by researchers at Northwestern University, published in the journal JAMA Dermatology, found that middle-aged women who practiced facial yoga for 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week, experienced significant improvements in cheek fullness and a reduction in facial age after 20 weeks of practice.
The women were between 40 and 65 years old and all had wrinkles due to sun exposure. For the first two months, the exercises were daily and the rest of the time, every other day. According to the researchers, this improvement in appearance was due to the increase in the size of the facial muscles used.
A review of nine studies, published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, found that these studies had positive results in reducing sagging and wrinkles around the jaw, neck and jowls. However, the comparative studies did not have a control group, that is, a group of participants who did not do the exercises (or who did different exercises), to compare them with. This is a very important part of any study and without it it is not possible to determine whether the exercises are effective.
Face Yoga Exercises
There are different facial yoga exercises that can be performed to target specific areas of the face. Here are some examples that may yield better results than the pen technique:
- To reduce a double chin and improve the appearance of the jawline, a common exercise is to tilt your head back, looking up at the ceiling, while pushing your tongue against the roof of your mouth. This exercise helps tone the muscles in the neck and jaw and, if done regularly, can help reduce sagging in this area.
- For wrinkles around the eyes, an effective exercise is to place your index and middle fingers on your temples, apply gentle pressure, and blink rapidly, which helps strengthen the orbicularis muscles. This exercise can help reduce the appearance of fine lines and improve elasticity around the eyes.
- To improve cheek firmness, you can do the “cheek puff” exercise, which involves sucking in air and holding it on one cheek for a few seconds, then blowing the air to the other cheek and repeating several times. This exercise works the muscles in your cheeks and can help make them appear fuller and higher.
- To relax the muscles, you can perform a self-massage of the face, which can be combined with a skin cleansing routine or the application of creams. It consists of gently pressing with your fingertips on the muscles of the face to relieve tension, insisting on the forehead, between the eyebrows and the muscles around the eyes (be careful of the delicate skin of dark circles).
- To strengthen your cheek muscles, another exercise is to open your mouth and cover your teeth, as if to say the letter “o,” then try to smile, which tightens the muscles around your cheekbones.
It must be taken into account that these exercises are not going to work miracles and that, according to experiences, they require constant practice – and exhausting, who has 30 minutes a day to make faces -. Wrinkles are caused by age, sun and tobacco, and reducing or attenuating these aggressions is the best thing we can do for our skin.
However, facial yoga has the advantage of giving us a few minutes to connect with our body and become aware of the tension that manifests itself in the contractions of the muscles of our face. Having a relaxed face means looking better, reducing stress and promoting an overall sense of well-being.
