We all know that exercise keeps us looking young and feeling our best. But can extending workouts to our face have similar effects?

Possibly yes. That’s the idea behind face yoga – a growing trend that claims to deliver skin-lifting effects without surgery, needles, or even expensive skin-care products. If you are looking to fine-tune your features and make it plumper and youthful-looking then the new anti-ageing skincare trend 'Face Yoga' is here to help you out.

Origin of Face Yoga –

The practice of face yoga was originated in Japan. It involves making a series of faces to help you relax and tone your muscles to create a slimmer and younger complexion. Koko Hayashi, founder of Face Yoga with Koko, explained that face yoga includes two different types of exercises: Poses that wake up “sleeping muscles” to lift the face, and poses that relax overworked muscles to help reduce the appearance of wrinkles. Sleeping muscles are located in areas like the lower eyelid and cheeks, whereas overworked muscles are located in the forehead, between the eyebrows, and around the mouth.

What Is Face Yoga?

Face yoga is a series of facial exercises that are performed to improve elasticity and blood circulation in the areas of your face and neck. Face yoga is said to also help in tightening your facial muscles through short facial expression exercises so that it is toned and looks plump & well contoured. Face yoga may not necessarily get rid of wrinkles in aged skin, but it prevents or reduces its occurrence. The idea is that by performing these exercises you will keep your face looking toned and young, lifting areas which are sagging and drooping, and trimming off years from your visage.
The aim is to create a moment of self-care where you improve blood circulation for a healthy glow and reduce stress and tension in your face. Most people hold tension on their faces, whether through facial expressions or by spending too much time in front of a screen. “All these daily activities cause patterns in how we use our face and the specific muscles we recruit. This is why we want to focus more on releasing and softening our faces to let go of these patterns and any held facial tension.

Benefits of Face Yoga

Facial yoga helps in countering those stress effects mentioned above. According to two popular programs, Happy Face Yoga and Face Yoga Method, face yoga helps in:

• Releasing tension, which minimizes the appearance of stress lines on our faces
• Strengthening and toning of the facial muscles which ultimately widen eyes, raise cheeks, and firm up the jawline
• Increasing both the blood circulation and its flow to the skin, which makes the skin glow
• Smoothing fine lines and wrinkles
• Countering the effects of gravity

Here are some essential face yoga exercises to follow:

1. Jawline – To sharpen your jawline for a slightly chiseled look, look up to the ceiling and pucker your lips or stick out your tongue. Hold this position for 5 -10seconds and then release and come back to the normal position. Repeat this exercise 5 times.

You will feel a slight strain while you are doing it, which means you are flexing the muscles across your jawline to tone them up.

2. Lips – In order to contour your lips to look plumper, just smile while pursing your lips together and then directly go into a fish – face expression by sucking your cheeks inwards between your teeth.

3. Double Chin –
To help to get rid of a double chin, rotate your head clockwise and then anti-clockwise. Repeat this at least five times to tone your neck muscles which in turn will help with that double chin situation.

4. The eyebrow lifter –
To lift your eyebrows press the first three fingertips under each of your eyebrows to force open your eyes. Now smile as you try to lower your eyebrows against your fingers. Hold. Then close your eyes and roll your eyeballs toward the top of your head. Hold for 20 seconds and keep smiling. Release and repeat this exercise three times.

5. Forehead smoother –
To perform this exercise, first make a fist with both your hands. Then with your fingers facing toward you, place the knuckles of your middle fingers in the center of your forehead. Then apply moderate pressure, slide fists to each side of the forehead ending at the temples. This exercise helps in reducing fine lines and wrinkles. Repeat the exercise 6 times.

Instead of spending a fortune on some cosmetic surgery or dermal fillers, try spending just 30 minutes a day strengthening your muscles with face yoga. You can pair these exercises with some skin pampering rituals once a week like massaging your face with gua-sha tools and moisturizer, applying collagen-boosting skin serums with jade rollers, and putting your skin on a retinol treatment course and you are sure to see amazing results. Face Yoga is healthier, a freebie, and, best of all it actually works if you keep up with it!