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, 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.

"There was less water retention and better blood circulation... my skin was glowing.

And I got defined cheekbones and a jawline." For her, the routine is as much about self-care as it is about appearance.

"If I look good, I feel good.

How healthy your skin is affects your mood and your lifestyle."Changing phasesThe do-it-yourself ritual is evolving now.

In India, global companies, homegrown beauty entrepreneurs and face yoga specialists are positioning it slightly differently-as a workout, a natural alternative, a pre-event service, a preventative anti-ageing routine and a beauty maintenance habit.FACEGYM, a UK-based facial fitness brand, is among those trying to formalise the category in India.

It was launched in the country last month through a partnership with Reliance Retail.

A company spokesperson says the brand looks at face the way fitness companies look at body.

The company says it is not trying to replace facials, dermatology or aesthetic procedures, but to create a category centred on muscle activation and long-term facial fitness.

Its core customer in India is an urban, premium beauty consumer, typically in the mid-20s to early 40s, who already spends on skincare, wellness and fitness.

Women form a majority of the audience, but the brand says men are also showing growing interest in grooming and skincare.132635898Homegrown players say the category has been years in the making.

Vibhuti Vohra Arora has been offering face yoga classes through House of Beauty since 2018.

She says by 2021-22, the Indian beauty consumer was ready to learn face yoga online and pay for therapist-led services."We saw a gap in the market between traditional salon facials and clinics where everything was machine-dependent, and hand motions were limited," she says.

House of Beauty launched its first physical space in 2022 and has since expanded its services to tier-1 and -2 cities, including Jaipur and Nagpur.

This year she plans to open 15 centres that offer services like lymphatic drainage, facial cupping, microcurrent and LED therapy.Face fitness is not growing in isolation.

It is part of a wider movement where beauty, wellness, longevity and self-optimisation overlap.

Sowmay Jain, founder of healthtech platform Zelta, recently hosted a looksmaxxing party in Mumbai complete with a nail bar, an astro corner and a peptide bar billed as "the frontier of glow-up".Meanwhile, Chabbra is careful not to overstate the results of face yoga.

Having tried it twice, she says she cannot yet claim a visible transformation.

But she wants to continue.

"I wanted a bit of firmness on my face," she says.

"Maybe if I keep doing it for 6 or 10 months, I will see a bigger difference." ...