Gua Sha for the face and neck is called the Eastern Botox (or Eastern Facelift) for a reason. This TCM (or Traditional Chinese medicine) treatment, when applied to the face, has the following effects:
- Firms up your sagging facial muscles
- Smoothens the skin and reduces the appearance of wrinkles on your face
- Improves dark circles and bags under the eyes (the kind you get from advancing age)
- Lightens age spots and other skin discolorations
- Your complexion gets rosier and more radiant
- Helps clear up acne, rosacea, and other skin diseases on your face
How It Works
As discussed in detail in an earlier post Gua Sha refers to the age-old practice of doing rather hard scraping motions all over the surface of one’s body with a smooth-edged tool. It is hard enough to raise petechiae, reddish marks that typically signal a Gua Sha therapy session.
Facial Gua Sha is much much milder but has the same scraping action along the skin. As the skin is scraped, the layers of the skin are stimulated. Stagnant lymph that causes puffiness is moved and cleared out of the system. Toxins are also released resulting in a clearer complexion. And finally, the massaging action relaxes tense muscles from which wrinkles are born. It’s a win-win-win scenario.
Now let’s start:This photo gives you the general direction we’ll be taking. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s complicated. Once you start doing it, you’ll realize it’s the easiest thing and that it only takes a few minutes.
Now here are the general steps you can do as a beginner:
- Third Eye: Stroke from the middle of your eyebrows and up to your hairline. This area activates healing.
- Lower forehead: Sweep from the center of the forehead above your eyebrows going out to your temples.
- Under eyebrow: Use the curved part of your gua sha tool to scrape the area underneath your eyebrow and above your eyes. Stay on the bone of the brow.
- Under the eyes: Slowly and lightly stroke the area where your eye bags typically show. Start from the side of your nose and go up to your temple. Imagine moving the stagnant lymph from the middle of your face up to the temple and all the way to the hairline.
- Cheek: Do the same sweeping motion for the cheek area. Go from the side of your nose, across your cheek, and up again to the middle of your ear.
- Mouth area: Do the same for the mouth area again sweeping the lymph upward to your ear.
- Chin: Sweep from the middle of your face, under your lower lip and to the earlobe.
- Under chin: Scrape from the soft area under your chin to the bottom of your ear.
- Neck: Finally, it’s time to scrape from your jaw and earlobe down to the middle of your collarbone.
- The big sweep: Collect all the lymph you’ve moved to the side of the face and dump it to your lymphatic drainage. Sweep from the center of your forehead right under your hairline, down to your temple, down to your ear until you reach your neck and terminus area. Do several times for a clean sweep.
- Now do the other side.