Facial Exercises Yield Firmer Skin

Facial exercises have helped middle aged women appear to look more youthful. 30 minutes a day or alternating days of a facial exercise program over 20 weeks yielded frimer skin, fuller lower cheeks and fuller upper cheeks resulting in a more youthful appearance as rated by dermatologists according to reports from Northwestern Medicine as published in the journal JAMA Dermatology.

During the aging process the skin on the face will lose its elasticity, and with age the fat pads between the skin and muscle start to become thinner. These fat pads under the skin fit together somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle, giving shape to much of the face. As the skin becomes saggy the thinning fat pads atrophy and slide causing the face to change and fall down. If the muscles underneath the skin should become bigger, it would serve to provide the skin with more of a sort of stuffing underneath it, resulting with the firmer muscle appearing to make the shape of the face more full.

Middle aged women between the ages of 40 to 65 who participated in this study underwent 2 sets of face to face 90 minute facial training sessions from a facial exercise instructor. At home the participants continued to carry on with these facial exercises for a 20 week time period. During the first 8 weeks participants did the daily exercises for 30 minutes. For the following 12 weeks the participants did the same exercises for 30 minutes but only on every other day.

Gary Sikorski developed and supplied the facial exercises from Happy Face Yoga. Participants were shown and learned to perform 32 facial exercises, each exercise taking about one minute to be used in the duration of this study. Exercises were such as The Happy Cheeks Sculpting which entails one to smile without showing teeth, purse the lips together, then smile forcing the cheek muscles up, then place your fingers on the corners of your mouth and slide them up to the top of the cheeks and hold for 20 seconds.

27 participants started off in this study, with only 16 of them doing all of the exercises for the entire duration of the study period. Limitations of this study are the small size, and that all of the participants were female and middle aged.

The outcome measure was assessment of standardized pictures before, during and after facial exercises by 2 dermatologists. The dermatologists looked individually at 19 features of the face and rated them all at 3 different stages of the study which were at the start, at week 8 and at week 20. The dermatologists also rated age at the same time points. The dermatologists found that the lower and upper cheek fullness was significantly enhanced. On average the participant age appeared to decrease over the study period of almost 3%. All of the participants reported being very satisfied with the results and noticed improvements on nearly all the areas that dermatologists had rated.

The growth of muscle under the skin increases facial volume and can counteract the age related effects of fat thinning and skin loosening. If these results can be reproduced in a larger sampling this could prove to be a non-toxic and nonsurgical way to look younger.