Physical Activity and Fitness Technologies

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Is Facial Fitness The New Face Lift?

In a world where injectables seem to be available on every corner, Hannah Thompson asks: are face workouts the no-needles answer we’ve been waiting for?

Is it your pores, your jawline or your ever-so-slightly wonky nose? Whatever it is that bothers you specifically, we’ve all fallen deep into over-analysing our faces, and understandably so. Just when the omnipresence of social media left us sure that we couldn’t be any more exposed to our own image, along came a pandemic which hurried us further into the house of mirrors.

The more we Zoomed, Facetimed and Instagrammed in an attempt to keep ourselves connected with the outside world, the more we picked, poked and prodded at our own reflections. According to my work calendar, I spent over 150 hours on video calls in the last three months of 2021 alone; no wonder I'm now hyper-aware of my own facial asymmetries - from my dominant raised eyebrow to the way one side of my mouth slightly pulls down when I talk.

Ironically, the same screens that had us reckoning with our faces day in day out also provided us with a connection to a new skincare movement that was beginning to emerge. Almost overnight, leagues of fresh-faced ‘skinfluencers’ appeared, not just cleansing and masking, but expertly scraping, rolling and pulling their faces in front of the camera. But they hadn’t mixed up the recipe for a sourdough starter and an at-home face mask: they were extolling the benefits of facial fitness.

The details of face training will differ depending on who you speak to, but comparisons are frequently drawn to the way we exercise our bodies. 'According to data from Pinterest, searches for "Face yoga exercises" and "How to get naturally glowing skin" quadrupled during 2020,' says Olivia Houghton, senior creative foresight analyst at trend forecaster The Future Laboratory. desire for filling time and adopting easy-to-master hobbies, the face fitness trend largely grew around the use of facial massage and tools. The centuriesold East Asian gua sha quickly became one of the most popular techniques, with the Tiktok hashtag reaching 840.1M views (and counting).

But can face training really live up to the promises made by its glowing and sculpted fans? As a beauty journalist, I’ve become immune to the clickbait nature of quick fix promises and social media trends. And, to be honest, lazily accepting of the idea that if you want to see profound change in your face it's probably going to come at the tip of a needle. Facial fitness, however, wasn’t only taking off at a rate I’d never seen before, but was also a movement accessible to people of all skin types and ages.

Intrigued, I picked up a gua sha tool and started using it for 5-10 minutes a day- and I noticed an immediate change in my reflection. My skin looked healthier and more alive than it had in months, and I was suddenly aware of just how much tension I was carrying in my face. Both suspicious and in awe of them, I started to speak to experts in these techniques to find out what, if anything, was happening below the surface.

Facial massage, a long-standing technique for releasing tension is something that Abigail James, expert facialist and author of The Glow Plan, has been practising with her clients for over 15 years. After training in sports and Ayurveda lymphatic massage, she realised the applications were transferable to our faces. ‘In our face, not all of the muscles are connected bone to bone, some of them are actually attached to each other so that we can express. We still get tension in those muscles – you can look at someone's face and immediately see if they're stressed, happy or upset,’ she explains.

‘Where you've got tight muscles, you're going to have fluid that won't be able to pass through as easily because there's tension. With massage, you can work along stretching out those muscles to release that tension.’ In both the facials she performs in her clinic and the techniques she shares with followers on Instagram and Youtube, James favours the physical and emotional benefits of touch rather than that of tools.

The point of these techniques is to get beneath the surface, working with the muscles in a way that ultimately benefits the skin. ‘Facial massage is about helping to boost blood circulation, and as we do that we bring fresh blood and nutrients up to the skin surface,’ says world-leading face yoga expert Danielle Collins, whose multifaceted approach combines the benefits of stretching muscles and massage. ‘It also works on lymphatic drainage, helping to remove the toxins from our skin and ease any tension.’ The results? A radiant, plump, and sculpted complexion.

Facialist and Chinese medicine practitioner Ada Ooi - the hands responsible for many a red carpet glow - has clients from around the world returning for her signature blend of gua sha, traditional Chinese acupuncture and reflexology. Her all-encompassing facials are designed to stimulate the body's meridian lines, an aspect of traditional Chinese medicine which conceives of channels of interconnected pathways that transport energy across the body. While on a surface level, Ooi’s facials leave clients with radiance and defined features, there’s an element of training for the muscles too. ‘The long term benefits of gua sha and massage is that the more you do it, the more you signal to the area that you’re massaging and train it on how it should behave,’ she says.

The more you do it, the more you signal to the area and train it on how it should behave.

As FaceGym founder Inge Theron explains, where facial massage focuses on muscle manipulation, face exercise (also known as face yoga) is ‘resistance training’. ‘When you're actually pulling and pushing your muscles, you get an exhaustion, and the muscle is strengthening because it's working out,' she says. 'Where the muscle is the scaffolding that your skin sits on, if your muscles are toned and tight, the skin is toned and tight.’

By Hannah Thompson