Skip the Botox. Try Facial Yoga

Forget what your mother told you about making faces. Turns out it just might be good for you. Or at least that’s what the people who sign up for Annelise Hagen’s Yoga Face class believe. Lining up in front of the mirror at the New York Health & Racquet Club in midtown Manhattan, they press their fingers into their foreheads and move them around, stick their tongues out and let them hang. Practitioners say manipulating face muscles tightens sagging skin and reduces wrinkles. And thanks to this promise to retard the aging process, facial yoga is gaining popularity in gyms and yoga centers from Pittsburgh to Honolulu. “It’s in the zeitgeist right now,” says Hagen.

A former actress who has been teaching yoga for eight years, Hagen, author of The Yoga Face, started to develop her facial technique when she realized that many of her clients, most of whom are well-educated New York City professionals, were getting Botox injections during their lunch breaks. “It didn’t seem to be in the spirit of yoga to me,” she says. So she devised her routines by combining acting exercises with the “facercise” craze of decades past. Rose Hong Tran, a Houston-based hatha yoga instructor, says she worked with local physicians to develop her facial-toning technique.

Yoga theory has long held that unreleased tension moves into the jawline, where it takes a toll in aging that creates wrinkles. Learn how to release the jaw, face-yoga devotees say, and the face takes on a more youthful appearance. “I look at myself now and say, ‘That old lady is leaving,'” says Irene Elmore, who has been attending Hagen’s class for about a month.

Dermatologists agree that stretching facial muscles may tighten them, but as in so many things, moderation is key. “If someone was doing a bizarre contortion, they could spasm. They might actually cause permanent damage,” says Dr. Min-Wei Christine Lee, director of the East Bay Laser and Skincare Center in Walnut Creek, Calif. But, she adds, a little cheek-puffing and lip-pouting “could help train muscles not to go into those worry lines.” Even Mom would approve of that.