Face fitness is having a moment in India
Lying on a leather chair, Kampan Rampal Chabbra felt the upward gliding pressure of the aesthetician's fingers on her face. The 34-year-old nutritionist from Bilaspur
Lying on a leather chair, Kampan Rampal Chabbra felt the upward gliding pressure of the aesthetician's fingers on her face. The 34-year-old nutritionist from Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, was trying facial yoga for the first time in Mumbai, where she was on her annual trip with her best friend. She felt the puffiness on her face melt away.Chabbra, who had been asking her dermatologist to add a little more to her face routine "as we are not getting any younger", chanced upon "face fitness" on her Instagram feed. It promised to lift and sculpt face muscles, even reduce fine lines and help with acne, with just hand movements, tools and muscle stimulation. This is anti-Botox, the other end of face care without invasive procedures. Chabbra's treatment involved hand strokes, serums, packs and hot towels. "It was refreshing," she says.Face fitness or face yoga is targeted facial massage but the terms themselves feed into a world obsessing over wellness and exercise. It borrows the aspiration of aesthetic medicine, the ritual of skincare, the discipline of fitness and the language of wellness.It is catching on at a time when the pressure to put one's best face forward in today's hyper-visual world is deeply felt, when even GLP-1 drugs are increasingly spoken of in aesthetic terms.Fix the skinPooja Lalwani Tamang, founder of the facial workout studio Fit Face in Khar, Mumbai, says her customers include Gen Z, millennials, people over 50 and women in their 70s and 80s.
Men account for 30-40% of her clientele. "A lot of people are getting very conscious of the way they look, face-wise and body-wise. Every time we introduce a new treatment, it is not like we have to really convince people to do it," she says.Farah Maneckshaw, therapist and founder of The Mirrored Room, a mental health initiative in Bengaluru, says clients are increasingly focusing on body image concerns, especially facial features. The anxiety, she says, is also shaped by a beauty culture that has moved away from makeup to skin, structure and a "natural" appearance. The language of fitness makes work on appearance sound less like vanity and more like discipline, she says. "Fitness, wellness and health are all used in a way that makes it a little bit more palatable. Wellness has become a catch-all phrase and fitness has become a way to talk about these things and sell them in a way that is received better."Before face fitness became a studio service, it was a face ritual that one researched online and tried on oneself. Noida-based marketing professional Shivani Aggarwal came across the concept a few years ago through the videos of Japanese face yoga instructor Koko Hayashi. That led Aggarwal to gua sha which she incorporated into her night routine. "I could see a visible difference in a week's time," she says.
The BriefWire