Top 5 Best Facial Exercises For Anti-Aging
Leading anti-aging skin creams are a great way to fight the appearance of aging on your face, but a growing number of beauty professionals are advocating for another anti-aging strategy. Facial exercises, also known as facial yoga, can improve the appearance of the skin, accentuate your best features, and provide a host of additional short and long-term benefits to your health and wellness.
The connection between different parts of the body is a well-known phenomenon, both in traditional and alternative medical circles. By utilizing facial exercises, men and women can help improve the appearance and health of the skin on the face.
The scientific consensus is divided on the efficacy of facial exercises. Although researchers have not yet proven that facial yoga can have a long-term impact on the youthfulness of the face, dermatologists working for the Feinberg School of Medicine found that certain facial exercises can reduce the effects of aging on the skin.
On this page, learn more about the best facial exercises, the benefits of practicing facial yoga, and a few tips on how to implement facial exercise into your daily beauty routine.
Fighting the Aging Process Using Facial Exercises
Reversing the visual effects of aging has long been one of the main goals of researchers and companies in the beauty sector. Many consumers use a combination of different creams and serums to improve the appearance of the skin on the face, reduce wrinkles, lift the eyes and cheeks, and sculpt the jaw. Facial exercises shouldn't be your only anti-aging tool, but they can be a helpful way to naturally increase your youthful looks and minimize the telltale signs of aging.
Like other forms of yoga, facial exercises offer additional benefits beyond temporarily reducing the visual age of the face. By practicing facial yoga, you'll feel healthier, more beautiful, and calmer. And why wouldn't you? After all, spending a few moments massaging your face can be a fantastic way to start your day off right.
How Do Facial Exercises Work?
Facial exercises work by massaging the skin in key areas of the face, including the cheeks, eyes and eyebrows, and the jawline. These three focal areas tend to be the places where aging is most apparent, so some beauty researchers have spent decades looking for natural ways to make them appear more youthful. Now, health researchers are beginning to view facial exercises as a viable anti-aging beauty practice.
Best Facial Exercises To Fight the Appearance of Aging
Like we mentioned above, three main areas of the face are generally where the effects of aging are clearest:
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The cheeks
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The eyes and eyebrows
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The chin and jaw
Our five favorite facial exercises can help make you look younger, especially if you work them into a daily routine. Like anything else in the beauty industry, practice makes perfect and consistency is key. Let's take a look at five of the best facial exercises that can help fight the appearance of aging on the face.
"The Cheek Lifter"
As we age, the cheeks often begin to droop. Anti-aging creams are one way to fight this aging process without resorting to surgery or Botox injections, but a solid facial exercise regimen can also provide excellent short and medium term benefits.
How do you exercise your cheeks? To exercise and lift the cheeks, begin by opening your mouth in an "O" shape. Make sure that your upper lip is resting over your teeth, and then smile wide! Put both of your fingers on the tops of your cheeks and hold them, pushing the cheeks up before releasing. Experts recommend repeating this process at least ten times.
Over time, you should see a visible improvement in the placement of your cheeks. Be sure to avoid putting too much pressure on each cheek, and try not to do the exercise more than recommended. Researchers say that too many repeated movements of the face can actually create wrinkles, which is most definitely not what you want!
The Eyebrow Lift
The eyebrows are another part of the face that tends to droop as we grow older. It's perfectly natural for the eyebrows to begin to droop lower with age, but that doesn't mean we have to accept it! If you want to lift your eyebrows without resorting to anti-aging skin creams, surgery, or Botox, working an eyebrow lift facial exercise into your daily facial workout can be a great choice.
According to Northwestern Magazine, the "eyebrow lifter" is a remarkably easy exercise that may be able to minimize the effects of aging on your eyebrows.
How do you do the eyebrow lift exercise? To practice facial yoga on your eyebrows, use three fingers under each of your eyebrows to push your eyes open. Then, smile while attempting to shut your eyes. Once you've done this for a few seconds, close your eyes and try to look up toward your head. Hold this position for about twenty seconds.
When you do this exercise, make sure you're not putting too much pressure on your eyes. Remember that your goal is to gently massage the face using facial yoga - the last thing you need is to injure yourself!
The Chin Press
Of all the visual effects of aging, it tends to be a droopy chin that contributes most to our self-consciousness. Especially in the age of staring down at smartphones and computers, it's natural for our chins to begin to droop as we get older. Luckily, a combination of all-natural skincare products and facial yoga can help the chin return to its rightful, tight place!
How do you exercise the chin to make it look younger? To exercise your chin, sit straight up and press the skin in the middle of your chin, pushing it inward toward the neck. Hold this position for at least a few seconds before releasing, and then repeat 3-5 times. Like we mentioned earlier, you'll want to avoid repeating this exercise dozens of times per day. Over-exercising the skin can lead to more wrinkles, and it could also lead to discomfort and soreness!
Sculpting the Jaw
Everybody wants a sculpted jaw - not just men and women who have begun to age. Anti-aging beauty products can increase the tightness of the skin, giving the jawline a more defined look. But if you're not in the market for skin creams and serums or you want an easy way to see improvements at home, jaw sculpting facial yoga is a great place to start.
How do you sculpt the jaw using facial exercises? To do this facial exercise, use the knuckles of your index fingers, running them along the upper jawline as your thumbs massage the lower side of the jawline. You can do this by making a "heart" with your index fingers and thumbs and then pulling the two halves of the heart apart.
Run your index fingers and thumbs up the length of your jaw until you reach the bottom of the ears. Release, and then repeat a few more times.
Sculpt the Eyes and Cheeks
Again using your knuckles, you can exercise the eyes and cheeks to lift them and reduce the appearance of aging on two of the most age-evident parts of the face. Take your knuckles and begin at the nose, running them under the cheekbone until you reach the ears. Once you're there, take your knuckles and sweep back and forth from each eye to your temples.
The skin around the eyes is very sensitive, and repeating this movement too much could make you sore or cause damage to the skin. Make sure to be gentle and avoid getting close to the eyeball itself. Over time, this exercise can help you sculpt both the eyes and your cheeks to reverse the visual signs of aging.
Scientific Consensus: Do Facial Exercises Actually Work?
Experts don't quite agree on whether or not facial exercises are effective. Most researchers believe that facial exercises alone are ineffective at making the face younger, but new studies have found that repeated facial exercises can improve the appearance of the face, providing an excellent lifting effect. One study published in the National Library of Medicine found that a "20-week facial exercise program" may "modestly improve the facial appearance of selected middle-aged women."
While researchers aren't sure how permanent the anti-aging effects of facial yoga truly are, adding a facial exercise regimen to your daily beauty routine can be a great way to improve your mental health, self-confidence, and, if you're lucky, restore some youthfulness to your face!
Dr. Alena Butkevica, Ph.D., explains that the skin is a soft organ that, like the body's muscles, can be exercised. Tense muscles underlying the skin can eventually become weaker and wrinkly, Dr. Butkevica elaborates, and exercising the skin on the face can have a lasting impact on both the health and the appearance of your skin.
In a sense, Dr. Butkevica argues that massaging or exercising the face can help men and women relax the tension in their muscles, something that provides a number of benefits to both your face's appearance and your overall wellness.
Exercising your face can also reduce fat accumulation on the neck, which provides two main benefits. First, fat accumulation on the neck in women can press on the thyroid gland, says Dr. Butkevica, suppressing its function. Second, men and women experience "dead weight" on the air passages when they accumulate fat on the neck and face, which can cause problems with sleep, exercise, and other important daily activities.
While surgery to remove unwanted fat is one potential treatment option, both the cost and potential side effects of neck surgery are prohibitive to most consumers. Facial exercises provide a healthy alternative to surgery for people who want to improve the appearance of their skin and massage away the appearance of face and neck fat.
Beyond Facial Exercises - Adding Anti-Aging Creams To Your Routine
We always recommend a multi-pronged approach to anti-aging beauty and wellness. Combining a facial exercise routine with a healthy diet and beauty cream routine can drastically improve the progress that you can expect from the facial exercises alone.
AB BIO's ABSOLUTE YOUTH line of creams and toners is especially designed to boost lymphatic drainage and detox, two core benefits typically associated with facial exercises and yoga. ABSOLUTE YOUTH, which won several industry awards in 2024, boosts arterial blood flow. This process introduces more oxygen and nutrients to the facial skin, providing a number of anti-aging and wellness benefits.
According to Dr. Alena Butkevica, Ph.D., adding a skin cream to your daily facial workout routine is one way that consumers older than forty can maximize the efficacy of facial yoga. AB BIO's hydrating skin toner for men and women can help consumers avoid sagging skin and begin to reverse some of the telltale signs of aging.
Striking a balance between all-natural skin creams with scientifically proven formulas and a facial yoga routine can make a world of difference for men and women looking to look - and feel - their very best!