Facial Exercises

I am completely bewildered by the enthusiasm facial exercises seem to generate. I get swarms of letters from women telling me that I have my non-exercised head screwed on wrong when I suggest that facial exercises don't work. But is there any research that explains the mania surrounding all this stretching of the face muscles?

For the most part, facial exercises are more a problem for skin than a help. Facial exercises provide little or no benefit because loss of muscle tone is not a major cause of wrinkles or sagging skin. In fact, muscle tone is barely involved in these at all. The skin's sagging and drooping are caused by four major factors:

1. Deteriorated collagen and elastin (due primarily to sun damage);
2. Depletion of the skin's fat layer (a factor of genetic aging and gravity);
3. Repetitive facial movement (particularly true for the forehead frown lines and for smile lines from the nose to the mouth);
4. Muscle sagging due to the loosening of facial ligaments that hold the muscles in place.

Facial exercise is not helpful for worn-out collagen, elastin, or the skin's fat layer, because none of that is about the muscles. It is especially not helpful for the lines caused by facial movement! Instead, facial exercises only make those areas appear more lined. The reason Botox injections into the muscles of the forehead and facial lines work to create a smoother face is because Botox prevents the muscles from moving!

Facial exercises won't reattach facial ligaments; that is only possible via surgery. One procedure in a surgical face-lift is to re-drape the muscle of the cheek and the jaw, drawing it back and then literally stitching it back in place where it used to be. Exercise doesn't reattach the ligaments, it just tones the sagging.

The ads for facial exercises often tout the fact that the facial muscles are the only muscles in the body that insert (or attach) into skin rather than into bone. They then use this fact to explain why, if you tone facial muscles, they directly affect the appearance of the skin. What this doesn't say is that skin movement is one of the things that causes the skin to sag. If you are doing facial exercises and can see your skin move or frown lines and laugh lines look more apparent, it only makes matters worse.

As I was researching this article I found the name of one dermatologist whose name showed up repeatedly on Web sites selling facial exercise programs. Dr. Wilma Bergfeld, Head of Clinical Research, Department of Dermatology at The Cleveland Clinic and the first woman president of the American Academy of Dermatology (1992) was quoted as someone who thought facial exercise was worthwhile. I had to hear this for myself. I spoke with Dr. Bergfeld and it turns out she isn't quite a supporter of facial exercises. "While there is no research or studies demonstrating facial exercises as being helpful, it is a reasonable assumption that it may be useful," she said. "Though I don't recommend them I do believe they could work in some controlled situations. However, you would never want to do anything that moves the facial skin, especially as it ages, or overmanipulate the skin," Bergfeld added, "because it would create more wrinkling, increasing the loss of elasticity in the skin."

If facial exercises that move the skin are problematic, what about electrical stimulation for the facial muscles? Wouldn't that form of involuntary stimulation tone the muscles without causing movement of the skin? The answer to that question is a resounding yes. It would exercise the muscle without moving skin. But there is no research demonstrating that this wouldn't make matters worse by creating surfaced capillaries, and it doesn't address the issue of the muscle being toned in the wrong area (since most women start this treatment only after the muscles are already sagged and stretched). And it won't affect the ligaments that have caused most of the sagging and drooping in the first place.

Paula Begoun