Facial exercises may significantly reduce some signs of aging, according to an interesting new study of the effects of repeating specific, expressive movements on people’s appearance.
The study, published in JAMA Dermatology, found that middle-aged women looked about three years younger after a few months of exercising.
In recent years, facial exercise programs have become available that claim to be able to reverse many visual effects of aging. The programs, often advertised as “nonsurgical face-lifts,” generally have been developed by self-taught men and women, with only anecdotal evidence of beneficial effects. They drew the attention of a group of dermatologists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
“We became aware that there were all of these commercial programs — DVDs, instructional videos, even personal trainers — that purported to be able to help people exercise their faces in ways that would make them be happier, healthier and maybe look younger,” said Dr. Murad Alam, vice chairman of dermatology at Northwestern. “But we were not aware of any scientific proof that these programs could be effective.”
So he and his colleagues got in touch with Gary Sikorski of Providence, Rhode Island, who had developed Happy Face Yoga, one of the longest-established facial exercise programs. The basic premise of facial exercising, Sikorski said, is that it provides a kind of resistance training for the facial muscles and should make those muscles stronger and larger, theoretically filling in spaces hollowed out with age, reducing wrinkling and rounding facial contours.
With that lure, the Northwestern scientists had little difficulty in recruiting 27 women ages 40 to 65 who wanted to try facial exercising. They met with Sikorski for two 90-minute sessions, during which he taught them 32 exercises. Some are elaborate, using fingers to provide light resistance while someone smirks, puckers or otherwise manipulates muscles in the cheeks, forehead or neck.
The full session took 30 minutes. The women were asked to practice the exercises every day at home. Over the course of 20 weeks, 11 participants dropped out, leaving 16 who finished the full program.
The researchers showed before-and-after photographs of these women to dermatologists who did not know them and asked the doctors to rate the appearance of various facial features and also to estimate the women’s ages.
They also asked the women how satisfied they felt. The women were enthusiastic, finding improvements in almost all of their facial features.
The dermatologists were more circumspect. They noted significant improvements in the fullness of the women’s cheeks but little noticeable change elsewhere. But they also estimated the women to be younger after the program. They ranked the women as, on average, about 51 years old in the photographs at the start of the study but closer to 48 years old after 20 weeks.
This study was obviously small, as well as short-term. Perhaps most concerning, more than a third of participants quit, suggesting that the exercise program was onerous. But it is reasonable to consider contorting and pinching up your face if you wish to try to look younger, Alam said.