Taping Your Face Won't Fix Your Wrinkles, But It Will Help You Look Like a Crazy Person

Of all the insane things that people have done to appear youthful throughout time — injecting fillers into your face, eating tapeworms, bathing in virgins’ blood (and those are just the preferred procedures of Kenny Rogers. Haha! Relevant!) — using tape to smooth out your wrinkles actually ranks pretty low on the list. It was common for starlets back in the golden age of Hollywood to tape their wrinkles back and then hide the tape under wigs when on camera or out in public and taping has been used as a way to reduce wrinkles for over 100 years. But does it actually work? No, not at all.

Gina Way at The Cut recently took one for the team and tried out Furlesse, an overnight patch that you stick to your face and will supposedly help smooth out your wrinkles. See? You don’t need fingerwaves and a top hat to look like Marlene Dietrich. Just stick a bunch of pasties to your face and be done with it!

Furlesse is actually the modernized version of Frownies — the preferred “wrinkle eradicator” of grandmas and very very old drag queens — a product which was invented by a super chill stage mother who wanted to smooth out her pianist daughter’s frown lines. Unlike Frownies, Furlesse is transparent (so that you can wear them around company?), hypoallergenic and latex free.

Way tried using them for a whole week:

My face looked a little like a UPS package, but underneath the clear packing tape, my skin was as lineless as a baby’s… They stayed in place all night, and were fairly invisible (transparent but a little shiny). But unless he’s lost his sense of sight and touch, or is completely clueless, any guy will notice that you have these on…

After one week of using them on my forehead and around my eyes, I didn’t notice any significant improvement.

According to Dr. Ellen Marmur, the dermatologist who Way spoke with, the only way that they could work is if you used them over an extended period of time in which they effectively stopped you for making facial expressions in your sleep. Orrrrrr you could just numb your expressions by sleeping facedown on a block of ice. Yes, you might get frostbite, but have you seen this guy? So well preserved.