2024.10.24

Facial muscles

2024.10.24

Facial muscles

Mechanism of ageing

The face is one of the main – and often the most important – indicator of our age. Movement is not only necessary for our bodies but also for our faces. It gives us the opportunity to enhance our facial features in the same way that we enhance our physiques through sport. We can affect all these structures in natural ways. Massages and exercises have been relied on since ancient times to maintain facial health and youthfulness.

A complex biomechanical structure such as the face and neck is made up of around 100 muscles and 29 cranial bones – all in constant motion. And we want to blame the skin. Despite the skin’s amazing ability to constantly renew itself, it loses elasticity, sags and wrinkles over the years.

With ageing, the loss of bone mass in the upper jaw and cheekbones, together with the growth of the orbital fissure, changes the facial skeleton. As a result, the subcutaneous fat loses its stability and sags downwards under gravitational forces. Muscles shorten, their range of movement decreases, mimic wrinkles form and lymphatic flow is impaired.

Stress, irregular posture and prolonged static work create the appearance of a flushed, tired face. The shortening of the chest muscles as a result of irregular posture pulls the muscles of the neck downwards, resulting in a ‘double chin’. The downward stretching of the neck muscles pulls the facial muscles with it, resulting in the formation of a facial oval and the loss of the youthful angle.

Facial muscles

It turns out that the loss of tone in all facial muscles is just a myth. As we age, they don’t relax, but instead spasm and contract. To understand what we can correct in the face, we need to know what muscles make up the face. Facial muscles are divided into mimic and masticatory muscles.

Mimic muscles – These are thin muscle fibres without fascia (enveloping film). They differ from other muscles in the human body in that they attach to the bones at one end and to adjacent muscles or skin on the face at the other. When they contract, they move the facial skin, form wrinkles and depressions, give the face appropriate facial expressions, and convey emotional information (such as joy, surprise, shame, pain, etc.). The many combinations of muscle contractions are the basis for the enormous variety of facial expressions.

Masticatory muscles – Four pairs of strong muscles, two of which are superficial (the masseter and the pinky) and two of which are deep (the inner and lateral wing muscles). The chewing muscles have in common that they all originate from the bones of the skull and attach at different points in the lower jaw. They move the lower jaw as we chew, yawn and speak.

The muscles of mastication and mimicry change differently as we age because they have different functions and attachment patterns. Wrinkles are caused by spasm of the mimic muscles.

With age, drying and shortening mimic muscles pulls the skin behind it, the resulting redundant skin (which, losing elasticity, does not have time to contract with the spasmed muscle) inevitably falls in folds in the form of “bulldog cheeks”.

Thus, in most cases, the culprit of the cysts is not the skin, but the specific muscles that have wilted due to the loss of nerve fibres (atrofiia). For example, wrinkles in the forehead, chin, nose to lips and above the lips are the result of spasm of the mimetic muscles.

Chewing muscles spasms and changes in the shape of the face. As the masseter muscles attach to bone structures at both ends, when they contract or stretch, the jawline changes: the lower jaw starts to push forward and protrude towards the nose.

Our individual features depend not on our skin, but on the shape of our skull and muscles, on the way the muscles connect to the bones and skin, on the subcutaneous fat layer, etc., in short, on the skeleton on which the skin is stretched. And this whole system is not eternal.

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