Face yoga is a wonderful way to keep your skin looking firm, healthy and radiant. Whether it’s a facial workout, a facial massage or a shiatsu massage, it can bring unexpected benefits to our face. But is just doing face yoga enough?
One powerful facial beauty tool we’ve explained countless times in previous articles – Gua Sha. This ancient technique combines the benefits of crystal therapy and facial massage to lift and tone the skin of the face and promote blood circulation.
Gua sha and face yoga complement each other. So, today I’m going to talk about how to use a combination of the two to naturally lift your face and improve your skin’s health.
What is Gua Sha?
Gua Sha is a form of traditional Chinese self-massage. It uses hand tools to stimulate different areas of your face or body. For the facial scrapings we focus on today, these tools are usually made of crystals such as jade, clear quartz or rose quartz.
These tools bring the benefits of crystal therapy into your daily self-care.
Gua Sha has been used in China for thousands of years. Recently, the West has caught up to the advantages of this amazing technology. It has many benefits for our skin and our overall health, including:
- Increase circulation
- Infuses nutrients into the skin
- Remove toxins
- Promotes lymphatic drainage
- Improve skin elasticity
- Stimulates collagen production
- Increases muscle tone
- Reduce puffiness and congestion
As you learn more scraping techniques, you can focus on sculpting, plumping and contouring specific areas of the face.
Scraping is a part of traditional Chinese medicine. It works with meridians (energy pathways) and acupuncture points to promote our health and allow our qi (life force) to flow freely.
How Often Should You Scrape Gua Sha?
When I teach facial yoga techniques, I always talk about your own level. Rarely and often is the most sustainable way to bring new habits into your daily life.
Scraping is the same. We recommend starting with one minute a day and building from there. If you can get to the point where you can do it for about five minutes a day, you should see some great benefits.
But everyone is different, and our skin has its own unique needs. If you have sensitive or delicate skin, you may want to start with a minute every other day.
Pay attention to your face and skin. See how it reacts and build your scraping practice from there.
How do Face Yoga Gua Sha Work Together?
Facial yoga and Gua Sha are very complementary techniques. While both have their own benefits, using them together can increase their effectiveness and help you build a beautiful self-care practice while lifting and toning your face.
Facial Yoga focuses on five main areas: facial exercise, facial massage, acupressure, relaxation and wellness.
Gua Sha also helps to tone and strengthen facial muscles, release tension and promote blood circulation.
If you use them both in the same workout routine, we recommend starting with facial yoga. Scraping helps to open up pores, you don’t want to put your fingers on the skin and possibly introduce bacteria, right?
Start with total facial relaxation using facial yoga. You can mix and match with a variety of oils that suit you for better results. After a full face yoga session, get out your scraping tools (don’t forget to clean) for a deeper level of relaxation and exercise. Seems simple, right? The most important thing is the accumulation of time, and it takes long-term persistence before you can see a noticeable effect.
