Facial yoga is a needle-free way to help turn back the hands of time.
Although hearing something dubbed “facial yoga” might give you pause, it’s actually true. Women who performed 30-minute daily or alternate-day facial exercises for 20 weeks looked an average of three years younger, according to study published in JAMA Dermatology.
In the study, participants took part in two sets of face-to-face 90-minute training sessions conducted by a facial exercise instructor. They learned 32 exercises designed to stimulate the 57 muscles in the face, neck and scalp, and continued to do these exercises at home for 20 weeks. For the first eight weeks, they did the exercises daily for 30 minutes. From week nine to 20, they did the same exercises every other day for 30 minutes.
Facial exercise makes perfect sense when you think about it. Your skin loses elasticity and the fat pads between the muscle and skin grow thinner with age. Couple that with the pull of gravity (sagging skin, drooping fat pads) and the face begins to fall. Facial exercises build up facial muscles so the face becomes firmer and more toned.
The facial exercises in the study were developed by Gary Sikorski of Happy Face Yoga, who is a co-author on the study. Try some of the study-proven facial exercises here.
These exercises made a clear difference for study participants. Dermatologists rated before and after photographs and found that upper cheek and lower cheek fullness was enhanced by the program. They estimated that average patient aging decreased over the course of the study. It started at 50.8 years, then dropped to 49.6 years at eight weeks, and finally to 48.1 years at 20 weeks. Study participants also reported being highly satisfied with the results and noticed improvements on nearly all the facial areas that were rated.
“Facial exercises that may be beneficial include those that entail puckering and squeezing the cheeks,” said study author Murad Alam, MD, vice chair and professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and a Northwestern Medicine dermatologist, in a news release. “There are many muscles that collectively allow movement of the cheeks, and our study showed that building these up makes the upper and lower cheeks look fuller.”
The bottom line? Facial yoga can’t hurt, it’s low-cost and just may help you look younger.
If you are concerned about facial aging, connect with a local board-certified facial plastic surgeon to discuss all of your treatment options now.