Facial Exercises for Jowls: Do They Actually Work? What the Science Really Says

Spend five minutes on TikTok and you’ll find someone promising that twenty daily facial exercises will redraw your jawline. The pitch is irresistible — no needles, no creams, no money, just consistency. The hashtag #jowlsworkout has hundreds of millions of views. And the underlying logic seems perfectly reasonable: your body responds to exercise, so why wouldn’t your face?

The honest answer requires separating two questions that get blurred together. Can facial muscles get bigger with training? Yes, modestly. Does building those muscles fix jowls? That’s a different question, and one the anatomy answers less generously than the influencers suggest.

What jowls actually are

A jowl is not a wrinkle, a loose patch of skin, or a single sagging structure. It’s the visible consequence of three separate changes happening at once below the surface of your lower face.

Surgical anatomy studies have shown that the jowl forms in the subcutaneous layer overlying the posterior part of the mandibular ligament. The mandibular ligament tethers a small patch of skin firmly to the jawbone, while the tissue immediately behind it is free to descend. As that tissue migrates downward, it bunches against the fixed point — and that bunching is what you see as a jowl [1].

Three age-related changes drive the descent:

1. Fat compartment ptosis. Your face contains discrete fat pads, each held in place by ligaments. With age, these ligaments stretch and the pads shift downward [1].
2. Subcutaneous tissue elongation. The short, elastic connective tissue that gives young skin its mobility-without-laxity gradually lengthens, allowing the dermis above to drape rather than spring back [1].
3. Bone resorption. The mandible itself loses volume over decades, reducing the structural scaffold the soft tissue rests on.

None of those three is a muscle. The masseter (the chewing muscle just behind the jowl) is essentially the only sizeable muscle in the area, and it’s already getting plenty of exercise every time you eat.

What facial exercises can — and cannot — do

The most-cited study supporting face yoga came from Northwestern University and was published in JAMA Dermatology in 2018. Sixteen women aged 40 to 65 completed a 20-week program of 32 daily facial exercises. Independent raters estimated participants looked about three years younger by the end (mean estimated age dropped from 50.8 to 48.1), with measurable gains in upper- and lower-cheek fullness [2].

As that tissue migrates downward, it bunches against the fixed point — and that bunching is what you see as a jowl.

Note what the study did not show. It did not measure skin elasticity, collagen density, or wrinkle depth. The improvement came from muscle hypertrophy pushing the overlying fat pads upward — essentially adding a small structural pillow under the cheek. The lead author, Dr. Murad Alam, was explicit that the effect was modest and that the trial had no control group, no blinding, and high dropout [2].

A 2025 face-yoga trial in Medicina echoed the pattern. After eight weeks of intensive practice, middle-aged women showed reduced muscle tone and stiffness in the frontalis and corrugator (forehead and brow-furrow muscles) and increased strength in the digastric — a small muscle running under the jaw [3]. The digastric finding is the one that gets quoted in jowl-exercise content. But the digastric is a swallowing and jaw-opening muscle. Strengthening it does not lift the SMAS, restore retaining ligaments, or replace lost fat-pad volume.

An earlier 2013 trial in Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica came to a similar conclusion: facial exercises produced subjective improvement on observer ratings but no objective change in measured skin parameters [4].

The pattern across the literature is consistent. Facial exercises can build small amounts of facial muscle. That muscle can subtly reshape the overlying soft tissue. But the mechanism of jowl formation — fat-pad descent, ligament laxity, and dermal aging — is not a muscle-strength problem, and building muscle does not reverse it.

The risk most exercise programs don’t mention

Repeated, exaggerated facial movement is the primary cause of dynamic wrinkles. Every crease in the corrugator zone (between the brows), every fan of crow’s feet at the outer eye, and every horizontal forehead band started as a movement pattern. The same expression repeated daily, decade after decade, becomes a static line as the underlying dermis loses the collagen and elastin needed to bounce back.

This is why dermatologists are quietly cautious about jowl-exercise programs that prescribe dozens of repetitions of dramatic mouth, cheek, and chin contortions. The same forces that build muscle also accelerate the formation of smile lines, marionette lines, and the very nasolabial folds the exercises are supposed to soften.

Collagen I formation increased by 80%, compared with a 14% decrease in the vehicle group.

If you do practice facial exercises, the safest approach is gentle, controlled isometric work without forceful repetition. Watch yourself in a mirror and stop any movement that visibly creases the skin.

What actually works on the dermis

The lower face changes that facial exercises can’t reach — the slow thinning of the dermis, the loss of fibroblast activity, the accumulated photodamage — are precisely the changes that topical retinoids can reach.

The foundational evidence is now over 30 years old. In a landmark New England Journal of Medicine trial, Griffiths and colleagues took serial biopsies from photodamaged forearm skin during 10–12 months of daily 0.1% tretinoin. Collagen I formation increased by 80%, compared with a 14% decrease in the vehicle group [5]. That collagen restoration is the mechanism behind every improvement people report from retinoid use — improved firmness, faded wrinkles, thicker dermis, less crepey texture.

A 2010 head-to-head trial in British Journal of Dermatology compared a 0.02% tretinoin regimen against a cosmetic niacinamide/peptide/retinyl-propionate regimen across 196 women over 24 weeks. The two regimens produced statistically comparable wrinkle reduction — confirming that retinoid-class ingredients are the active driver of measurable change [6].

Crucially, retinoids work on the structural cause of dermal aging. Facial exercises, at their best, push slightly thicker muscle against an unchanged dermis. Retinoids change the dermis itself.

Where Nanoretinol fits

Conventional retinol works, but it has a delivery problem. The molecule is unstable in light and air, irritating to many skin types, and most formulations struggle to push enough active retinol through the skin barrier to reach the fibroblasts that need to be stimulated.

Nanoretinol addresses that delivery gap by encapsulating retinol inside biomimetic lipid nanoparticles — particles the body recognizes as “self” and allows through the epithelial barrier without disruption. North Biomedical’s clinical study summary reports a 232% improvement in collagen recovery and a 73% improvement in elastin recovery versus conventional retinol, alongside 61% increases in skin firmness and 56% in elasticity after 56 days [7]. The formulation is water-based, 99% natural, and gentle enough for daily use on the thin skin of the lower face — exactly the area where jowls form.

That combination — proven retinoid mechanism, better delivery, daily-use tolerance — addresses what facial exercises cannot: the dermal architecture under the lower face that loses integrity over time.

A more honest framing for the lower face

Facial exercises are not snake oil. They are also not a face lift. For middle-aged women whose jowls are early and primarily driven by fat-pad descent, a consistent face-yoga practice may produce a small, real improvement in cheek fullness — and that improvement may modestly reduce the visual prominence of the jowl. That’s worth having.

But the improvement is small, the mechanism is structural-not-dermal, and the same repeated movement that builds the muscle accelerates the wrinkles you weren’t trying to make worse. For dermal firmness, elasticity, and the collagen restoration that actually thickens the lower face from the inside out, the active ingredient with three decades of randomized evidence is a retinoid. Facial exercises are a complement at best — never a substitute.

References

1. Minelli L, Yang HM, van der Lei B, Mendelson B. The Surgical Anatomy of the Jowl and the Mandibular Ligament Reassessed. Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. 2022;47(1):170-180. doi:10.1007/s00266-022-02996-3
2. Alam M, Walter AJ, Geisler A, et al. Association of Facial Exercise With the Appearance of Aging. JAMA Dermatology. 2018;154(3):365-367. doi:10.1001/jamadermatol.2017.5142
3. Güzel HC, Keçelioğlu Ş, Kurtoğlu A, Elkholi SM. Effect of Intensive Face Yoga on Facial Muscles Tonus, Stiffness, and Elasticity in Middle-Aged Women: A Pre-Experimental Clinical Trial. Medicina (Kaunas). 2025;61(5):840. doi:10.3390/medicina61050840
4. De Vos MC, Van den Brande H, Boone B, Van Borsel J. Facial exercises for facial rejuvenation: a control group study. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica. 2013;65(3):117-122. doi:10.1159/000354083
5. Griffiths CE, Russman AN, Majmudar G, Singer RS, Hamilton TA, Voorhees JJ. Restoration of Collagen Formation in Photodamaged Human Skin by Tretinoin (Retinoic Acid). New England Journal of Medicine. 1993;329(8):530-535. doi:10.1056/NEJM199308193290803
6. Fu JJJ, Hillebrand GG, Raleigh P, et al. A randomized, controlled comparative study of the wrinkle reduction benefits of a cosmetic niacinamide/peptide/retinyl propionate product regimen vs. a prescription 0.02% tretinoin product regimen. British Journal of Dermatology. 2010;162(3):647-654. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2133.2009.09436.x
7. North Biomedical LLC. “Nanoretinol vs. Conventional Retinol: Efficacy in Collagen and Elastin Recovery.” Clinical Study Summary, 2024. northbiomedical.com/documents/Nanoretinol-Study_Summary.pdf