Do you need to exercise your face?

Do you need to exercise your face? 🏋🏻‍♀️#askdrnatalia Face exercises or ‘face yoga’ are the trendy new way to supposedly strengthen the muscles of your face to help fight the signs of aging (like sagging jowls and wrinkles). Does it work? Should you do it?

I practice evidence-based medicine and so the first thing to say is that there are no rigorous, scientific studies to verify the claims that these sorts of face workouts are effective. Therefore, my professional opinion on this is going to be based on first principles combined with logic. Can doing facial exercises actually ‘build’ the muscles of the face? We know that muscle growth comes about from damage of the muscle via active use – like weight-lifting in the gym.

The damage induced stimulates a whole host of responses which culminate (hopefully) in the muscle becoming bigger and stronger. If you have ever tried to put on noticeable muscle mass in the gym, you will know that this is actually a lot more difficult to achieve then it sounds and even with meticulous attention to lifestyle, diet and programme planning, one can and should only expect small gains to be made over time. Facial yoga does not involve any weight bearing and, even though these are small muscles, they would still require a decent enough stimulus to initiate the muscle growing process. So based on this I would suggest that no, facial exercises cannot build muscles in the face.

Why would you want to enlarge the muscles of your face? Is muscle atrophy what causes the signs of aging? Loss of muscle as we age is a natural part of aging and certainly some of that occurs in the face but the aging face is due to an interplay of many factors like fat loss, loss of collagen and elastin in the dermis of the skin and changes to the epidermis. Though facial exercises are certainly not harmful, they are very unlikely to bring about significant, noticeable changes to your skin or facial structure.