“If somebody is looking to remove [buccal] fat before a certain age, I personally think it’s a sin,” says Susca, whose celebrity clientele includes more than one legendary, chart-dominating megastar. (I had to promise not to name them here.) “It’s like your insurance for looking more youthful when you are 40, 50, and 60 years old,” she says. “That’s what is going to keep the skin from wrinkling and having no support system underneath it to hold it taut.”
The pros and cons of face exercises
You may have seen some influencers praising the slimming effects of various face exercises. Technically, they don’t work—but there’s an asterisk. “Facial exercises have sparked a lot of debate recently,” says Dr. Kazlosukaya. “While some say they are useless, others claim they offer many benefits.” The best research we have on this—a small 2018 study, published in the journal JAMA Dermatology—demonstrated that facial exercises may have a positive impact on slowing or even reversing the appearance of aging in the face. “However,” Dr. Kazlosukaya says, “we do not have robust data, and no evidence exists to support their effectiveness in slimming the face.”
Basically, the study found that when a small group of middle-aged women followed a strict face exercise regimen for five months (daily 30-minute sessions for two months, reduced to every other day for the next three months), dermatologists who had never seen the participants before rated them up to three years younger than their actual biological age.
Technically, though, these results had nothing to do with fat loss, but rather muscle gain that ultimately presented as increased fullness in participants’ cheeks. It is also worth noting a couple of major flaws with this research, including the complete absence of a control group and the fact that more than a third of the study’s initial participants dropped out, likely due to the understandably impractical time commitment involved.
Losing fat isn’t the only way
There are other things you can do to slightly but noticeably slim down your face, such as lymphatic drainage. “In the face, you have your skin, and you have the lymphatic system right underneath that,” explains Susca. Using a technique like microcurrent therapy or Gua Sha, a qualified and experienced provider can help move out excess lymph fluid, resulting in a more svelte appearance.
“Doing lymphatic drainage will definitely reduce some of the extra puffiness and fullness in your face,” says Dr. Yoo. “That is something that’s backed by science.” The only catch is that this effect won’t last all that long. “Is that going to make you look slimmer next week than this week? No. It’s an effect that will last for a day, so we would have to repeat it daily. But, for a few hours at a time, it’s definitely going to be an improvement,” says Dr. Yoo.
If you do opt for lymphatic drainage, just make sure you go to someone who actually knows what they’re doing. And avoid the DIY route at all costs. “Ninety percent of the time, what I see on the Internet and social media, they’re not doing it properly,” says Susca. With something like Gua Sha, “that can lead to bruising, and bruising can cause pigmentation,” says Dr. Kazlosukaya. “So it’s not without risks.”
There’s always that option
What we haven’t covered here is the lengthy list of more invasive options, and that’s mostly because these are extremely specific to the individual and should be chosen carefully, if at all, under the guidance of a qualified and trusted professional.
For example, there’s Kybella—a double-chin treatment whereby deoxycholic acid is injected below the chin to break down fat cells. “It’s not a procedure that I love, but we’re just talking about what’s out there and what people are doing,” says Dr. Yoo. (“If you can imagine simply injecting a fluid into the fat layer, it’s hard to be super precise about which fat gets dissolved and which doesn’t,” he says. “For patients who have some fat along their jowls or jawline, surgical liposuction is probably the better option.”)
Either way, this is a whole other conversation with an entirely different set of considerations, and once you start down the path of injectables and cosmetic surgery, the first treatment rarely ends up being the last. “It’s kind of like a treadmill,” says Dr. Yoo. “You’re going to look older this year than you did last year. And so with treatments like that, you’re basically rewinding a couple of years, but that doesn’t mean that your skin and your soft tissue is not going through the aging process continually. It really depends on how proactive you want to be.”
