Valentina, it can help when properly done by a professional. At home devices don’t do much.

Peka, I’m glad to hear that facial exercises helped your father. But I don’t think you can say that slack facial muscles are sometimes the sole cause of aging as it’s a known fact that your skin loses a bit of collagen every year, unprotected sun exposure adds up and everything starts to decline as you get older.

Peka, I know there is a lot of proof that exercise work for other muscles. Facial muscles are a little different because they attach to other muscles of directly to skin, NOT to your bones like the other muscles in the body. I’m waiting for studies to determine whether this makes a difference or not. If I see studies showing this makes no difference, I will edit the post accordingly. It’s not that I want to hate on facial exercises, it’s that I haven’t seen enough proof to back up their effectiveness – and I acknowledge part of it is because of the lack of studies on facial exercises.

Also, as loss of muscle tone isn’t the only cause of premature aging. I’m curious how facial exercises can make up for other factors, like bone loss.

There is plenty of “scientific proof explaining” resistance exercise. Yes, people can sometimes hurt themselves exercising improperly. And yes, it’s true that exercise is not a cure-all magical fix for every human ailment, but that it “works”, and benefits our bodies in many ways, is well established.

You’re essentially dodging this by throwing in the qualifier “facial”, as if that changes things, but it really doesn’t. To truly use a skeptical approach, the claim in question should not be whether resistance exercise (facial or otherwise) works. We already know resistance exercise causes muscles to either get stronger, larger, or both. The claim that should be in question, the one you seem to be blindly accepting, is the claim that facial muscles don’t respond to exercise the way our other muscles do.

The burden of proof is on you, and all the gurus you personally put your faith in, to demonstrate that.

If you can provide studies and conclusive evidence demonstrating that facial muscles are somehow, magically, functionally different from the other muscles we exercise, then you might have a valid claim. But without such evidence (and in fact, with a growing pile of evidence to the contrary), the logical and skeptical position is that facial muscles can be toned, strengthened and/or enlarged just like any other muscle we can consciously contract and flex. There’s no reason to assume otherwise, and every reason to conclude this is so (not the least of which is the fact that speech therapists and various types of physical therapy employ facial exercises for facial paralysis, like palsies). To insist otherwise is not being “skeptical” or “scientific“. It’s just special pleading.