How to reduce forehead wrinkles with face yoga

[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Jennifer Morris for howdini.com. If you've considered Botox but decided it's not for you, you might want to know about face yoga. It's a system of stretching and working face muscles, which is supposed to help reduce wrinkles. To demonstrate is Annelise Hagen. She's a yoga instructor and the author of The Yoga Face. All right, Annelise. Are there really exercises so that I won't have to go get Botox? There certainly are and I'd be happy to share them with you. And what are they? How does that work? Well, you're using the basic principles of movement and exercise. So if a muscle is contracted and then released and works with resistance, it'll get stronger, it'll tone. So the muscle under the skin is going to be plumper. It's going to be fuller. It's going to lift rather than fall. And that'll bring the skin up with it. And it's also been shown that when a muscle is repetitively worked, the production of collagen and elastin is prolonged. So collagen and elastin are those connective fibers that help the skin to say resilient and springy. OK, so what are some exercises for-- The forehead? Yeah. OK, well I'm going to give an all all over facial toner first of all, which is thousands of years old. It comes from yoga. It's called the lion face. And what this does is it tones all of the muscles of the face and releases stress. And so I'll just demonstrate. You're going to take an inhale. And you're going to scowl and pucker up everything and exhale and release it. All right. Should I give it a try? Yeah, give it a good shot. OK, inhale? Inhale, scrunch, squeeze, pucker everything up. And exhale, stick out the tongue, open the eyes very widely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Like that? That was awesome. How many times a week would you recommend doing-- and just that one exercise will get rid of wrinkles on my forehead? It'll help. I mean, not alone. I have other ones, but that's a really good all-purpose facial toner. Can you give me one more? Yeah, this is one of my favorites. Only because this is easier. It's a big muscle that we're working with here. It's called the frontalis, and it's underneath your forehead and it connects to the scalp. So most people have an easy time learning how to use this because we're very expressive. We know how to move this muscle. Exactly. Yeah, and people think, oh, this is just going to make me more wrinkly. Well, if you just did this, maybe. But with the fingertip pressure at the outer edges of the temple, you're using this so that the muscle has something to resist. And you're going to do the same repetition, like 20 of these. So you're going to go like this. But you're going to also hold down for resistance. Don't be afraid to give yourself quite a bit of fingertip pressure here. I work the frontails hard. [LAUGHTER] Good, and then let it go. OK, what about these little lines here? What can people do for those? Yeah, the pucker line, right? From frowning or thinking. What you want to do, paradoxically, is make the line and then resist by placing your index fingers above the center of each brow and pulling back. So you're going to make that muscular action, but then resist it. Yeah. Just like you're erasing. Try to stay very calm. So you're going to just knit the brow together and then resist that action by pulling away. More like index fingers above the middle of the brow than the center. So you can go wider. There you go. And you hold that for about five seconds? Five seconds, yeah. And then repeat it again. So after you do one of these facial isolations, like you just did the forehead and you're very rosy and pink. This is a good thing to observe because it really does show that circulation is being conducted into the cells of the skin, and that's a huge thing for anti-aging. And how long again does it take to see results? Three to four weeks of continuous practice. You can't just go into your bathroom one day, do it once, and then like in two weeks say, oh, it didn't work for me. Thank you so much. I'll give it a try. You're welcome. OK. I'm Jennifer Morris for howdini.com. [MUSIC PLAYING]