Some research shows that facial exercises, and exercise in general, can help reduce the appearance and severity of jowls by making the facial, jaw, and neck muscles better able to hold their shape.
Try these facial exercises to help improve jowls:
Hold a smile shape with the lips wrapping your teeth. Place your index finger on the chin for resistance. Now scoop the jaw backwards. Take 2 fingers and a thumb and pinch all the way up the jaw area to release tension.
When it comes to treating jowls, injectable options like dermal fillers are ideal for restoring facial volume, while ultrasound treatments like Ultherapy are effective when it comes to stimulating the growth of new collagen supplies to directly reduce the sagging effect of jowls.
Some research shows that facial exercises, and exercise in general, can help reduce the appearance and severity of jowls by making the facial, jaw, and neck muscles better able to hold their shape.
Even if you do lose weight evenly, there is no guarantee that your skin has sufficient elasticity to tighten up underneath the chin as you slim down, which could leave you with empty, sagging skin where the jowls used to be.
While a loss of elasticity can start happening in your late 20s depending on your genetics, Shafer says that it's especially common in late 30s to early 40s patients. “This is most often when patients start looking in the mirror and noticing that their skin is not as 'tight,'” he explains.
Exercising the neck, chin, jaw, and other facial muscles can lead to subtle changes in your face, including sharper cheekbones and a more prominent jawline. One study found that performing regular facial exercises over the course of 20 weeks led to fuller cheeks and a more youthful appearance.
So what can we do to prevent jowls? Prescribe a topical Retinol cream to stimulate your collagen production to give support and structure back into your skin.
“The buccal massage is one of the facial massage techniques that specifically targets the drooping of the jowls (the lower region of the chin), a universally known problem area,” Song says. She explains that while many try to tighten the area through topical means, like face creams and oils, it's often ineffective.
How vitamin D deficiency leads to accelerated skin aging isn't fully understood. However, some experts suspect it has something to do with vitamin D's protective and antioxidant properties on the skin.
Some experts say contorting your face in these ways can actually lead to more wrinkles. “Many facial wrinkles — for example, crow's-feet, laugh lines, and forehead wrinkles — result from repetitive facial muscle activity such as frowning or smiling,” Dr. Chen says.
By carrying out regular facial exercises, you can work these muscles to improve blood circulation to the different areas of the face, replenishing the oxygen supply in the muscles and the skin. This will result in a bright complexion and beautiful healthy glow, as well as alleviating skin tightening and sagging.
Your body has a pattern for storing fat, and it's going to follow that pattern, no matter what you do. So while overall exercising and dieting to lose weight could contribute to fat loss, in the neck and cheeks, it's unlikely that specifically exercising your jaw will help.
Face exercises might also help improve muscle tone in the face and could theoretically help with gravity-related fat loss or redistribution on the face, says Dr. Olbricht. Building muscle in the face could potentially help keep fat — which might otherwise slide down with the pull of gravity — where it belongs.
Jowls develop as the skin becomes less elastic with age because of elastin and collagen loss. Jowl development is also affected by various other factors including certain lifestyle choices and facial movement habits, genetic predisposition, exposure to sunlight, and chronic stress.
Extreme weight loss creates sagging jowls earlier or more drastically than typical. As you lose weight, you also lose fat from your face. Hence, the skin will be looser and you're more likely to see the jowls sag.
The jowl is actually a fat pad and will enlarge with weight gain; it also becomes more prominent with aging partly because facial volume in adjacent areas of the cheek can diminish relative to the jowl.
What are Face Jowls? Face jowls are the bags of skin along the jawline that sag or droop lower than the jaw. As the lower cheek muscles lose strength and volume, the skin gravitates down which gives the jawline an undefined, loose appearance.
Jowls are one of the most frustrating and yet most common signs of aging. They are the bags of skin and fat that develop along the jaw that lead to an undefined jawline appearance.
Although Botox can lift jowls, its effectiveness really does depend on the extent of the sagging. If you have large drooping jowls then Botox is unlikely to give you the results that you desire. In such cases, you really would be better off considering a surgical procedure.