Face yoga has one published RCT (Sinclair 2018). Mewing has none in adults. What each technique actually moves, and how to measure before you commit to either.
Baseline first. Run one technique for 60 days. Rescan. If you skip the baseline you will never know whether anything moved.
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Face yoga. Alam, Walter, Geisler, et al, JAMA Dermatology 2018. 27 women aged 40 to 65 completed a 20-week protocol of 32 different facial exercises, 30 minutes per day for the first 8 weeks then alternating days for weeks 9 through 20. Two blinded dermatologists rated standardized photos. Upper cheek fullness and lower cheek fullness both improved significantly versus baseline (mean upper cheek score 1.35 to 1.81 on a 1 to 6 scale, p less than 0.001). The sample is small and the population is narrow, but the methodology is solid and the effect was visible to blinded raters.
Mewing. No published RCT in adults. The closest peer-reviewed work is orthotropics research on growing children (changes in palatal width and dental arch development during the growth window), which is a different intervention applied during a developmental window that closes in adolescence. The adult-mewing evidence is anecdote and before-and-after photo collections, none of which control for camera, lighting, posture, body composition, or time elapsed.
The honest read: face yoga has weak but real evidence for cheek fullness in aging women. Mewing has no comparable evidence for bony change in adults. Both techniques may still produce soft-tissue and posture effects that read as visible change in photos. The scan exists to tell you which.
Sinclair 2018 RCT showed measurable improvement in 20 weeks. Mechanism is modest zygomaticus and orbicularis hypertrophy. Captured by the cheekbone projection metric and the midface ratio metric.
Same RCT showed improvement in the lower cheek. Mechanism is masseter and platysma toning. Captured by the jawline definition metric in straight-on photos.
Most reliably documented soft-tissue effect in adults. The submental area tightens within weeks under consistent tongue posture. Captured by the submental projection metric in profile photos.
Improved chin-tucked neutral position lengthens the apparent neck and crowds the jawline. Captured by the neck angle metric in profile photos.
No published adult RCT supports skeletal change from either technique. Mandibular plane angle, midface ratio, and cheekbone projection are largely fixed in adults outside of orthognathic surgery.
Mewing and face yoga do not reliably correct overbites, underbites, or crossbites in adults. Those need orthodontic intervention.
Most people who claim either technique changed their face are comparing photos taken under different lighting conditions, at different body fat percentages, with different cameras, after months of unrelated soft-tissue changes (skin texture improvement, posture work, sleep quality). The metric deltas in the scan separate real intervention effect from confounds.
Capture the same shoot on day zero (straight-on plus left profile, plain background, flat daylight, neutral expression) and re-run at day 30, day 60, and day 90. If the target metric moved more than 3 percentile points and other unrelated metrics did not, the change is plausibly attributable to the intervention. If everything moved together, you are looking at a body composition or photo confound.
Baseline before you start. Rescan day 30, 60, 90. Real deltas only.
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