Face yoga for beginners: six exercises to start with

Face yoga is exercise for the muscles of your face and neck. You use your own fingers as resistance or support, hold a contraction for a set number of seconds, and repeat. It takes about ten minutes, costs nothing, and needs clean hands and a bit of slip on the skin.

The set below is six moves that turn up in most beginner routines, described the way reputable coverage describes them, with reps and the cautions that usually get left out.

Before that, one thing worth setting straight so you can decide whether to bother. The research here is early. Face yoga is a plausible, low risk thing to try. It is not a proven method, and anyone telling you otherwise has skipped the studies.

What face yoga actually is

Muscles in your face attach to skin rather than to two bones, which is why they move your expression around. The theory behind face yoga is that working them the way you would work any other muscle makes them firmer and fuller, and that fuller muscle sits differently under the skin.

In practice a session is a series of held contractions. Your fingers usually do one of two jobs: they anchor the skin so the muscle works against something, or they stop the skin creasing while the muscle underneath contracts.

It is worth naming what this is not. It is not massage, and it does not move fluid. Puffiness is fluid, and exercise is the wrong tool for it. We compare the two properly in face yoga versus lymphatic drainage, and it is the single most common mix-up beginners make.

The honest read on evidence

The most cited study is a 2018 pilot published in JAMA Dermatology. Middle aged women did 30 minutes of facial exercise daily for eight weeks, then three or four times a week out to 20 weeks. Dermatologists rating the before and after photos scored upper and lower cheek fullness as improved, and estimated ages dropped from about 50.8 to 48.1 years.

Now the parts that matter. Twenty seven people enrolled and 16 finished. There was no control group. Everyone was a volunteer, which selects for people willing to keep going. The authors list all of this themselves.

Cleveland Clinic's dermatology write-up lands in the same place: the results are interesting, the participant group was small and highly motivated, and larger studies with control groups are needed before anyone recommends facial exercise as an anti-ageing method. Healthline describes the wider research as limited and mixed.

We go deeper into the studies in does face yoga work. The short version for now: try it if you like it, expect months rather than weeks, and do not spend serious money on it.

See what your routine could look like

Answer a few questions and Nodi builds a short daily face routine around your goals. Takes about two minutes.

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Before your first try

Wash your hands and your face. Put on a little facial oil or a rich moisturizer wherever your fingers will be sliding, because dragging dry skin is the fastest way to irritate it.

Sit somewhere with a mirror for the first week. Most beginner mistakes are visible and invisible at the same time: you think you are isolating one muscle and your whole face is joining in.

Work to comfort, never past it. Healthline's guidance is the same, and it is the only safety rule that really matters here. If something pinches, aches, or leaves your jaw sore, that move is out.

Ten minutes is a full beginner session. Six moves at roughly a minute each, plus settling time, gets you there.

Three moves for the upper face

1. Brow smoother. Place your fingertips in the center of your forehead, pointing inward toward each other. Press gently into the skin and draw your fingers outward toward your temples. Release, return to the center, repeat. Keep going for about 30 seconds. This one is aimed at the frontalis, the broad muscle across the front of your forehead that does most of your eyebrow raising and holds a surprising amount of tension.

2. Eye tension release. Press lightly on the inner corners of your eyes with your index fingers for 30 seconds. Then circle your fingertips gently around the eye socket, 30 seconds in one direction and 30 in the other. Then tap along the brow bone from the inner corner outward, press briefly at the temples, and tap back along the top of the cheekbone toward the inner corner. Use less pressure here than feels natural. The skin around the eye is the thinnest on your face.

3. Cheek lifter. Purse your lips together and smile, lifting the cheek muscles as you do. Place the fingers of each hand either side of your mouth and slide them up to the tops of your cheeks, supporting the lift. Hold for 20 seconds, then release. Repeat two or three times. You should feel the work in the upper cheek, not in your jaw.

Three moves for the mid-face, jaw and neck

4. The O mouth cheek raise. Open your mouth into an O shape with your lips folded over your teeth, then smile. Place the fingers of each hand on the top of the matching cheek and gently lift and lower the cheeks for 30 seconds. This is the moving version of the cheek lifter, and it is the one most people feel the next day.

5. Jaw release. Make a fist and rest it against the side of your jaw. Turn your head toward the fist while your hand stays exactly where it is, so the two press against each other. Hold for a few seconds, release, and repeat on the other side. Two or three rounds per side is plenty. Go easy if you clench or grind your teeth, because that jaw is already working overtime.

6. Lion's breath. Lean forward slightly. Inhale through your nose, then open your mouth wide, stick your tongue out and down, and exhale forcefully with a "ha" sound. Relax, and repeat up to seven times. Finish with a minute or two of ordinary deep breathing. It looks ridiculous and it releases a lot of tension around the jaw and throat, so do it somewhere private and do not skip it.

How to fit it into a week

Daily is the target, and ten minutes is the dose. Consistency is doing far more work here than intensity, and the study everyone cites is a study about showing up for months.

Evening tends to suit it better than morning. Your face is already puffy when you wake, and holding contractions in a swollen face is neither pleasant nor productive. Evening also fits it neatly after cleansing, when you have oil on your hands anyway.

Give it eight weeks before deciding whether it is doing anything, and take a photo at the start in the same light and the same position. Face changes are slow and your memory of your own face is unreliable.

Where massage fits alongside it

Face yoga and lymphatic drainage are aimed at different layers and run on different clocks.

Exercise works on muscle and takes months. Massage works on fluid and takes minutes. If your complaint is a puffy morning face, a sharper looking jaw before a meeting, or the general heaviness of a bad night's sleep, that is fluid, and light lymphatic drainage is the tool that reaches it. If your complaint is muscle tone over the long run, that is exercise.

The routine most people settle into is a few minutes of drainage in the morning, when puffiness is at its peak and the payoff is visible in the mirror, and their exercise set in the evening. They do not compete for the same slot and they do not undo each other.

Worth knowing where we stand: Nodi is our own app, and it does the drainage half. One technique, taught properly with filmed sessions, rather than a hundred exercises taught shallowly.

If the puffiness half is what you actually came for, that is the part Nodi handles: short guided sessions with real footage of the technique, so you are not pausing a video to work out which direction your fingers should be going. Take the quiz and start here.