Scientists are looking into exercises for the face that can make you look younger

When it comes to getting older, many of us would like to look younger, but most anti-aging treatments aren’t backed by science and are either too expensive or too painful to be worth it. either.

Now, scientists have found early evidence that facial yoga, which is free and doesn’t hurt people, can make people’s faces look younger in just 20 weeks.

Don’t laugh, because we understand how silly that sounds. But scientists at Northwestern University in Illinois were able to show that if you work out the muscles in your face for 30 minutes a day, you can tighten and lift your cheeks to look younger.

People have been doing facial exercises, also called “facial yoga,” for a long time, but this is the first study to look at whether or not they work.

Murad Alam, a dermatologist from Northwestern University and the study’s lead author, said, “There is now some evidence that facial exercises might make your face look better and slow down some of the visible signs of aging.”

The exercises make the facial muscles bigger and stronger, making the face firmer, more toned, and shaped like a younger face.

To be clear, this was a proof-of-concept study, and only 16 people who finished the whole 20-week program were used as participants. So, before we get too excited, we need to see this research done again with a much larger group.

But it does give us hope that we can make our faces look younger without spending hundreds of dollars on them.

“If the results are confirmed in a larger study, people now have a low-cost, non-toxic way to look younger or to add to other cosmetic or anti-aging treatments they may be looking for,” said Alam.

The study worked like this: 16 women between the ages of 40 and 65 were chosen to take part, and they met with a facial exercise instructor twice for 90 minutes each.

Over the next 20 weeks, they were told to keep doing the exercises at home. For the first eight weeks, they did them for 30 minutes a day, and for the rest of the time, they did the same exercises every other day.

For the exercises, you had to learn and hold 32 different facial expressions for about a minute each.

For “The Cheek Lifter,” you open your mouth and make a “O” with your lips.

When your lips are over your teeth and you smile, the muscles in your cheeks lift up. You can feel this by placing your fingers lightly on the top part of your cheek. You do this for a minute by moving your cheeks up and down.

“The Happy Cheeks Sculpting” is another exercise. To do it, close your lips over your teeth, smile, and pull your cheek muscles up by putting your fingers on the corners of your mouth and sliding them up to the top of your cheeks. This is held for 20 seconds.

Photographs were used to measure the change, and dermatologists did blind assessments, which means they didn’t know anything about the study or the people who took part in it.

These dermatologists looked at the photos and rated 19 features on each face at the beginning, middle, and end of the study using a standard scale for aging of the face.

At the start of the study, the dermatologists said that the patients were, on average, 50.8 years old. By the end of the study, that number had dropped to 48.1.

“That’s like looking almost three years younger in just 20 weeks,” said Alam.

The upper and lower cheek fullness, which got rounder and looked fuller over the course of the study, was the most noticeable change.

Of course, this is a very small sample size, and it’s only made up of middle-aged women, so we don’t know if facial yoga would work for people in other age groups yet.

The study also didn’t talk about or keep track of what else the women did to their faces while the experiment was going on.

But it’s a good sign that we could make ourselves look younger just by toning our faces like we do our bodies.

The study didn’t look at how facial yoga might work, but the team says that as the face ages, the skin loses its elasticity and the fat pads between the muscle and skin get thinner. This makes the face and skin fall.

“But if the muscle under the skin gets bigger, the skin has more stuffing under it, and the firmer muscle seems to make the shape of the face more full,” said senior author Emily Poon.

Muscle growth is making the face fuller and making up for the loss of fat and sagging skin that come with age.

There isn’t enough proof yet that you should start doing facial yoga every day, but you should think about it the next time you spend hundreds of dollars on the latest anti-aging trend.