There's so much facial movement that goes on I was worried it would actually cause more wrinkles, a concern the authors had already considered. "Frown lines and smile lines are caused by repetitive facial motions that we make for many hours a day over many years. On the other hand, we asked participants to do each individual exercises for just one minute per day," explains Murad Alam, M.D., the lead author of the study and professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "So it is likely that the exercises we recommended were enough to grow some muscles to fill out the face, but not enough to cause wrinkles."
Even though I did an abbreviated version—about six minutes per day for seven days—I noticed a difference. My face was actually a little sore! After a 16-hour-long flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, my face didn't look nearly as swollen and puffy as it usually does after a long haul. After a few days in Hong Kong, just as I was beginning to adjust to the time zone, I left for a wedding in Bangkok. And in photos, I actually look like myself, not the bloated doppelgänger that usually rolls through customs.
I then flew to Los Angeles and did the exercises on the flight (a mere 13 hours this time). This round was less successful, partly because I kept interrupting the exercises to check if the flight attendants could see me. I was paranoid that I'd be caught with my fingers holding up my cheeks and my eyes rolled all the way back—which is fine in the privacy of my own home, but less so in public. (The feeling reminded me of when I used a neti pot in my sorority house bathroom in college: embarrassing but totally worth it. At least this didn't involve snot.) But the attendants or fellow passengers didn't seem to notice or care, thankfully. I probably made more of a scene when I sobbed during Coco.
Since I've returned, I've been slacking on my facial workouts, but I'll probably reincorporate them into my routine, because the authors guess that face exercises may have a preventative effect. "Facial muscles, like any other muscles on the body, can be exercised and do grow in size with exercise," explains Dr. Alam. "If you work to grow your facial muscle volume when you're young, your face may not thin out as much with age." And why not? It's free and I can do it without leaving the couch. If that's not a good way to take care of my skin, I don't know what is.
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