Today is the day that we challenge some of the bad optics and negative perceptions about facial exercises for wrinkles. With any rising trend, especially one that falls within the medical field, greater scrutiny is sure to follow.

The contentious Facial Exercise debate has been taking place for a long time now. See this 1979 Washington Post story, if you need evidence. Well, all this time later, we still believe in the Facial Flex, so that means we obviously are 100 percent behind the facial exercise. And we’re not afraid to talk about it.

Going in, one should understand that there’re many variables (diet for example) that contribute to achieving either a younger looking face, or an older looking one. There’s no magic wand and the onus can’t fall on any single thing. There are many means needed, unilaterally, to win your desired results.

Even though that WaPo article dates back decades, we also have to remember that, relatively speaking, facial exercise hasn’t been around long enough for there to be a lot of long-term data available. So we need to give pause to anyone speaking with certitude. This article in Self Magazine provides a nice window for looking in, showcasing the main competing viewpoints.

In one corner we have Gary Goldenberg, M.D., medical director of the Dermatology Faculty Practice at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He’s the critic. The Facial Exercise advocate is New York City-based dermatologist, Doris Day, who we’ve referenced in other posts before.

First Goldenberg, from the article:

“’This is a terrible idea and will only cause wrinkles,’” he says. Here’s why: Repetitive muscle contractions cause your skin to wrinkle (think: the two lines that show up on your forehead from furrowing your brow or crows feet from narrowing your eyes). Regularly giving your facial muscles a ‘workout’ will only speed up the process, increasing the chances you’ll get wrinkles sooner.”

Day’s response is that it’s not this simple, and one has to be smart when choosing effective exercises. She points to the fact that as people age, they allow their faces to pull inward and contract. This is seen through furrowed brows, clenched jaws, and pursed lips, each the result of “poor facial posture.” To counteract this, she says, one should focus on exercises that force these muscles to move outward.

“To strengthen those upward facial muscles—which can basically give you a facelift—she recommends doing a facial movement where you look like you’re going to laugh or smile, but don’t actually do it. That raises your eyebrows slightly and even impacts the muscles around your ears, strengthening them and pulling the skin over them back, Day says.”

So there you have it: Two supposed experts going at it on Facial Exercise. Does one cancel out the other? If that’s how you decide to look at it, we have no problem going back to our own evidence.

A lot of it, admittedly, is anecdotal. Strong believers reach out to us all the time and you can see that in our blog section, too. You simply cannot tell these people that their eyes are wrong when they look in the mirror. They know what they’re looking at.

On the other hand, we have more than just testimonials. We can point to facts about the human body, and the skin, that support the idea that the right kind of exercise is effective for keeping a young visage, which our Class 1 medical device is designed for. A blog post you might want to read about this would be “Exercise and the Epidermis,” which gets into what is happening underneath the skin with the collagen and elastin and how exercise can contribute to how you age.

Beyond that, we also have some common sense and basic facts. For one, Facial Flex is an inexpensive investment. This is especially true when compared to the invasive procedures that, in many cases, are stock and trade for the skeptics. You can’t blame dermatologists for being partial to their business. But because of that we should take what the naysayers say with a grain of salt–and be more trusting of what we see with our own eyes.