Face yoga is a new trend that activates facial muscles and helps minimize wrinkles. However, some people believe that face yoga can actually cause wrinkles.
While face yoga helps erase or decrease wrinkles, it can also cause wrinkles. However, face yoga only creates wrinkles if you do not do it properly. It is also essential to consider if something else caused your wrinkles, like sun exposure.
What Is Face Yoga?
Face yoga is a series of repeated facial exercises. People do it to reduce signs of aging, tighten the skin, and stimulate the face muscles.
Additionally, it can help you get a more “youthful” glow. It can increase blood circulation to your skin by strengthening the facial muscles and engages the muscles in resistance training.
However, it is important to remember that face yoga does not replace other anti-aging methods. For instance, face yoga will not protect you from wrinkles caused by sun damage.
Does Face Yoga Cause Wrinkles?
Face yoga can help prevent wrinkles by relieving tension, increasing blood flow, stretching the skin, etc. However, face yoga can also cause wrinkles if you do not do the exercises correctly.
If you try to do face yoga exercises which create wrinkles on your face, those wrinkles are bound to become permanent. That is because of how you do the facial exercises; you are purposely folding your skin, encouraging it to develop wrinkles.
When you do face yoga, you create resistance and opposite resistance with your facial muscles. However, the way you avoid creating wrinkles is to make sure you do not let wrinkles form when doing the exercises.
You might be doing the exercise incorrectly if you create wrinkles. You might be adding too much pressure or not following the instructions.
However, it is also possible that you did not choose the right exercise. Some exercises that you find may create a wrinkle in your face no matter what you do. Therefore, it would be best to skip that one altogether.
Luckily, you can tweak most exercises to avoid creating wrinkles. Take a look at the photo below.
When the exercise says to keep your palms on your forehead, make sure you do not apply pressure downwards. Instead, use your palms to pull your skin up gently to prevent creating wrinkles.
Face yoga rules are similar to regular yoga. You want to make sure your movements are slow and controlled.
You want to slowly activate your muscles and feel them so you can control them. Quick, abrupt movements will not help you achieve that and increase your chances of developing wrinkles.
Another good way to avoid wrinkles while doing face yoga is to protect areas where the wrinkles appear. For instance, you can use your finger to smooth out a crease if you see one pop out on your forehead.
Another helpful tip is to try face yoga exercises on your entire face, not just one area. For example, you should try to engage all the muscles surrounding your eyes if you want to decrease your dark circles.
It is important to continue the exercises afterward to see the best results if you follow training programs.
Other Causes of Wrinkles
Sometimes, it may not be face yoga that causes wrinkles, especially if you do face yoga correctly. You may not realize that other factors could be making wrinkles worse, which include:
UV rays
UV rays speed up the aging process, and it is a common reason people develop wrinkles at an early age. UV light breaks down the skin’s connective tissue like the elastin fibers and collagen, causing them to wrinkle.
Age
Of course, age is another common cause of wrinkles. Skin loses its elasticity with age and becomes more fragile.
Your facial fat decreases and shifts downward with age. The skin becomes loose and saggy, creating more pronounced lines and wrinkles.
Additionally, your skin does not produce as many natural oils as you age. Drier skin makes your skin look more wrinkled.
Repeated Facial Expressions
Each time you make a facial expression or movement, like smiling or squinting, you create a line on your face. While doing it for a second or two will be OK, making facial expressions for long periods can cause wrinkles.
It is why many people can get wrinkles from face yoga when they do it incorrectly. You should not create wrinkles on your face when you perform the exercises.
Repeated facial expressions and age often go hand in hand. As stated earlier, the skin loses its elasticity with age. Your skin will not bounce back as well as it used to if you constantly make the same facial expressions.
Smoking
Smoking can often speed up the skin’s aging process. Smoking affects the production of collagen (Knuutinen et al., 2002).
How to Prevent Wrinkles
As mentioned earlier, you can prevent wrinkles when you do face yoga by smoothening out wrinkles with your finger, doing face yoga slowly, and doing the correct exercises. There are other ways you can prevent wrinkles, which include:
Sun Protection
Ideally, it would be best if you tried to avoid the sun, especially during midday. You can wear sunglasses and wear protective clothing like long-sleeved shirts and wide-brimmed hats.
Additionally, you should wear sunscreen, even indoors. The UV rays can penetrate windows, so wear sunscreen daily and reapply every 2-3 hours. If you sweat or go swimming, you need to reapply more often.
Try to choose a broad-spectrum sunscreen with at least SPF 30. Broad-spectrum sunscreen means it shields your skin from UVA and UVB rays.
Quit Smoking
This preventive tip is pretty self-explanatory. Smoking speeds up the aging process and is generally bad for your health, so quitting would be for the best.
Moisturize
Young people don’t need to moisturize. The skin should moisturize itself, and if you start using a moisturizer when you don’t need it, your skin will adapt to the moisturizer and go back to normal. On top of that, your skin will go into withdrawal from the moisturizer if you quit.
With older people, it’s a different story. Our skin gets drier with age, especially with frequent sun exposure. Dry skin shrivels plump skin cells, causing premature wrinkles and fine lines. Moisturizer helps trap moisture into your skin, which can prevent wrinkles and potentially mask creases. You may have to wait several weeks or months to see improvement in your skin.
Botox
Botox can help treat dynamic wrinkles like forehead lines and crow’s feet. However, it does not erase wrinkles. More people use Botox as a preventative measure rather than a restorative one.
Botox freezes facial muscles, making it harder to make certain facial expressions that create creases and fine lines.
How to Treat Wrinkles
Dermal Fillers
Dermal fillers can make your face plumper and smooth out fine lines. There are different kinds of fillers, and each type works slightly differently.
For instance, PMMA, some hyaluronic acids, and polylactic acid can treat deep wrinkles. Most PMMA microspheres and hyaluronic acids can treat smile or nasolabial lines. Almost any kind of filler can add volume and remove lines on your chin area.
Each kind of dermal filler will last for different periods. For example, hyaluronic acids last for around 6-12 months, whereas autologous fat injections last forever.
Retinol
Retinol is a gold standard ingredient in dermatology and one of the few skincare ingredients that actually does anything. It requires building up to a full dose and takes months to see results, but retinol increases collagen synthesis in your skin, which removes wrinkles.
Many people consider retinol a better anti-aging ingredient than Botox. However, acquiring some requires a visit to your dermatologist.
Laser Resurfacing
Laser resurfacing removes layers of your skin. It encourages new skin cells to grow while your face heals. The new skin cells will make your skin look younger and tighter.
The pain you will feel will depend on the laser the doctor uses. For instance, non-ablative laser treatments often cause very minimal or no pain. A doctor may only apply a topical numbing cream for any discomfort.
However, deeper ablative laser treatments need intravenous sedation or local anesthetics. Some patients say it feels similar to a rubber band snapping against the skin.
