Face Gyms Are Coming For All of Us 

A new pop-up shop in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport is offering a “facial fitness” workout, a series of face movements meant to keep your skull-mask looking young and supple. Because death and time are merely an illusion, and through the proper fitness routine, you too can pass through the earthly veil of failing flesh into immortality. Also, it comes with a massage!

DNAInfo reports that the new shop, Skin Gym Face Fitness, is offering a 15-minute face workout for $15. It involves big orange bands and tongue depressors and does not look weird and no one is laughing at you, I swear, I was just thinking about something funny that happened another time, when I was watching someone work out her face:

The face gym was opened by three female entrepeneurs; one of them, Kate Gyllenhaal, a personal trainer, tells DNAInfo, “We’ve got 57 muscles in our face. Working them out, training them, is just as important as the rest of the body. We like to say, ‘Why stop at the neck?'”

And of course face workouts aren’t a new thing: Face exercises have been around for centuries. Back in February, our own Mark Shrayber covered the FACIAL FITNESS PAO, a very serious piece of workout equipment that can only be written in ALL CAPS to convey how HARDCORE you will feel with it in your mouth.

But the idea of a dedicated gymnasium for your face seems to be taking off recently: beauty writer Inge Theron launched her own FaceGym at the Selfridges department store back in May. (A Marie Claire reporter who showed up for a workout found herself being lightly slapped and cheek-pinched and occasionally having Theron’s entire forearm being wiped firmly across her face.) That’s coincided with the burgeoning popularity of the FACIAL FITNESS PAO as well as things like Face Yoga, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Ultimately, I suppose my feeling about face workouts is roughly equivalent to how I felt when Dove introduced that deodorant to correct the tone of your unsightly greying underarms: Dammit to hell, is this something else I have to worry about? (The answer, of course, is no, thanks to my effective nightly regimen of virgin blood, goat entrails and a single hair plucked from Justin Bieber’s pubis.)

There, of course, the pesky fact that face workouts have zero science behind them. But it’s certainly less invasive than a facelift and probably slightly better for you than injecting botulism into your forehead to immobilize it, right? And really, how can you argue with the beauty secrets of ’90s health guru and hair idol Greer Childers?