watch: we make ridiculous faces for the #faceyoga trend
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did your mother ever tell you that if you make a funny face it might freeze like that? an ongoing tiktok trend is pushing back on this old wives tale, claiming that working out your facial muscles can actually benefit your appearance.
proponents are sharing various ways of “working out” your facial muscles, including making big facial expressions, with or without pressure from their hands. the claim is that doing this every day can result in a more “sculpted” appearance, reduce the presence of wrinkles, and/or create a more lifted, youthful appearance. the hashtag #facegym has 144.3 million views, while the hashtag #faceyoga has 568 million views on tiktok alone.
there may be some truth to it.
moving the muscles on your face can increase blood flow, which also increases the oxygen supply to the face, deborah longwill, board-certified dermatologist at miami center for dermatology in florida told everyday health. this can improve the health of the cells, and may lead to healthy, glowing skin.
in one study, 16 female participants between the ages of 40 to 65 attended two muscle-resistant facial exercise training sessions, then committed to an at-home facial workout every day for eight weeks. after eight weeks, participants then moved to doing the exercises every other day for the next 12 weeks.
by the end of the study, participants were generally rated as looking younger. two physicians were asked to estimate the ages of the photographs taken of the participants at various points throughout the study — the doctors didn’t know when the photos were taken. the mean guess was 50.8 years old for photos taken at the start of the study, 49.6 years at the eight-week point and 48.1 years old at the end of the study. the participants themselves also reported they were satisfied with the results.
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murad alam, md, vice chair and chief of cutaneous and aesthetic surgery in the department of dermatology at northwestern medicine’s feinberg school of medicine, says that these results were likely due to the fact that the resistance training caused the facial muscles to grow, according to nbc news. developing these muscles may help offset drooping skin and loss of fat, creating a “fuller” appearance.
there’s no research
there isn’t any research to say if facial exercises increase the production of collagen and elastin fibres in the skin, thus reducing the long-term effects of moving our faces in predictable, repetitive motions, or if the results were purely from muscle development. more research is needed to understand how facial exercises affect the underpinnings of skin health.
previously, a 2014 review on nine facial rejuvenation techniques like facial exercises, facial massage, face building and face yoga, found that although all studies reported positive results, none used a control group or randomized treatments for proper comparison. many of the studies also relied on the participants themselves to assess the results, casting doubt on the findings.
can facial exercises backfire?
facial exercise has a lot of skeptics. when we make facial expressions — like raising our eyebrows — wrinkles appear elsewhere on the face as the skin compensates for the muscle movement. as we age, the components of our face that help the skin to spring back from these movements — like collagen and elastin fibres — begin to break down, resulting in wrinkles in telltale spots like the forehead, crows feet on the corner of the eyes, and laugh lines along the inside corner of the cheeks.
one of the favourite anti-aging interventions, botox, actually freezes the muscles in areas that wrinkles are beginning to form, which is said to prevent repetitive motion and thus stop the face from reinforcing these lines. facial exercises, by contrast, encourage the movement of the facial muscles, which may actually cause wrinkles, dr. jeffrey spiegel, chief of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at boston university school of medicine, told healthline.
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indeed, this was one of the concerns that alam had at the start of the 20-week study. and while researchers didn’t see deeper wrinkles appear in any of the participants over the course of the study, there isn’t any long term data that tells us what might happen if participants continued these exercises over the course of years.
emma jones is a multimedia editor with healthing. you can reach her at emjones@postmedia.com or on twitter @jonesyjourn
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