The Mechanism of Ageing
The face is one of the main – and often the most important – indicators of our age. Movement is essential not only for our body but also for our face. We have the opportunity to nurture our facial features in the same way as we refine the shape of our body through exercise. All these structures can be influenced by natural means. Since ancient times, people have relied on massage and exercise to keep the face healthy and youthful.
A complex biomechanical structure such as the face and neck is made up of around 100 muscles and 29 bones of the skull – and all of it is constantly moving. Yet we want to put all the blame on the skin. Although skin has the remarkable ability to renew itself continuously, over the years it loses elasticity, sags and wrinkles.
With age, loss of bone mass in the upper jaw and cheekbones, together with widening of the eye sockets, changes the facial skeleton. As a result, subcutaneous fat loses its stability and slides downwards under the force of gravity. The muscles shorten, their range of motion decreases, expression lines form and lymph flow is impaired.
Stress, poor posture and prolonged static work create a gloomy, tired-looking face. Because of the poor posture that develops, shortened chest muscles pull the neck muscles downwards, and a "double chin" begins to form. As the neck muscles are pulled down, they drag the facial muscles with them; as a result, the facial contour changes and we lose the youthful angle.
Facial muscles
It turns out that the loss of tone in all the facial muscles is merely a myth. With age they do not relax – on the contrary, they go into spasm and contract. To understand what we can correct in the face, we need to know which muscles it is made of. The facial muscles are divided into muscles of facial expression and masticatory muscles.
The muscles of facial expression are thin muscle fibres without fascia (the enveloping membrane). They differ from other muscles of the human body in that one end attaches to bone and the other to neighbouring muscles or to the skin of the face. When they contract, they move the facial skin, create wrinkles and dimples, give the face its expressions and convey emotional information (such as joy, surprise, shame, pain and so on). The countless combinations of muscle contractions account for the extraordinary variety of facial expressions.
The masticatory muscles are four pairs of strong muscles, two of which are superficial (the masseter and temporalis) and two deep (the medial and lateral pterygoids). What the masticatory muscles have in common is that they all originate from the bones of the skull and attach at different points on the lower jaw. They move the lower jaw when we chew, yawn and speak.
The masticatory muscles and the muscles of facial expression change our face differently as we age, because they have different functions and different ways of attaching. When the muscles of facial expression go into spasm, wrinkles appear.
As they dry out and shorten with age, the muscles of facial expression pull the skin with them; the resulting excess skin (which, having lost its elasticity, cannot contract together with the muscle in spasm) inevitably falls into folds in the form of jowls.
So in most cases the culprit behind the folds is not the skin but specific muscles that have withered because of the degeneration of nerve fibres (atrophy). For example, wrinkles on the forehead, in the chin area, from the nose to the lips and above the lips are spasms of the muscles of facial expression.
When the masticatory muscles go into spasm, the shape of the face changes. Because the masticatory muscles attach to bony structures at both ends, the jawline changes as they contract or stretch: the lower jaw begins to push forwards and curve up towards the nose.
Our individual features depend not on the skin but on the shape of the skull and muscles, on how the muscles connect with the bones and skin, on the subcutaneous fat layer and so on – in short, on everything that can be called the framework over which the skin is stretched. And this whole system does not last for ever.