Facial exercises can make women look 3 yrs younger

Facial exercises may reduce some of the 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, perhaps providing a reasonable, new rationale for making faces behind our spouses’ backs.

In recent years, a number of facial exercise programmes have become popular enough that they drew the attention of a group of dermatologists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

“We became aware that there were all of these commercial programmes — 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,” says Dr Murad Alam, the vice chairman of dermatology at Northwestern University, who led the new study.

“But we were not aware of any scientific proof that these programmes could be effective,” he adds.

So he and his colleagues decided to test the usefulness of facial exercises. They began by getting in touch with Gary Sikorski of Providence, Rhode Island, who had developed Happy Face Yoga, one of the longest-established facial exercise programmes.

The basic premise of facial exercising, Sikorski says, is that it provides a kind of resistance training for the facial muscles.

The Northwestern scientists recruited 27 women between the ages of 40 and 65 who wanted to try facial exercising. The women all were photographed and then met with Sikorski for two 90-minute, in-person sessions, during which he taught them the 32 exercises. The full session took 30 minutes.

The women were asked to practice every day for eight weeks. Then they were photographed again and told to continue with the full routine every other day for another 12 weeks. The women were enthusiastic, finding improvements in almost all of their facial features.

Dermatologists noted improvements in the fullness of the women’s cheeks after 20 weeks but little noticeable change elsewhere. But they also estimated the women to be younger after the exercise 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 of facial workouts.