Drinking Problems at the Fountain of Youth by Beth Teitell

Author:Beth Teitell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

8

FACIAL FITNESS: No PAIN, No VAIN

The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poor.

—JOAN COLLINS

When skin care’s the subject, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t usually spring to mind. Secretary of State Condi Rice maybe, but not him. And yet, if you think about it, Rumsfeld’s famous riff on “unknown unknowns” could double as ad copy for Neutrogena. “As we know,” he told the press corps in 2002, “there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

As in: Okay, I knew I had to worry about the wrinkles I could see, and I suspected I had to do something about sun damage lurking below the surface. But who ever thought to stress about flabby facial muscles? And yet, the threat of a ninety-eight-pound weakling of a forehead is out there—the dreaded unknown unknown.

The cosmetic “to do” list lengthens.

Your butt, it turns out, doesn’t have the only cheeks that need to feel the burn to stay perky. The neck and face have approximately fifty-five muscles, and if you don’t exercise them, they atrophy. That’s what one of the country’s top facial-fitness coaches told me. Yes, I said facial-fitness coach. To compete in today’s world, your forehead needs a personal trainer.

I wish I’d let this regimen stay one of those unknown unknowables. Because even though I’m not satisfied with my current skin care routine, at least the only energy required is unscrewing a jar lid or forking over my credit card.

But facial exercise showed up on my radar, and soon enough I found myself tracking down Cynthia Rowland, a powerhouse facial-fitness trainer. Part sports coach, part motivational speaker, Rowland says she’s on a mission to save women from the surgeon’s knife (and injections or anything that hurts or costs a lot of money, except her one-on-one coaching sessions, which start at $65 per fifteen-minute segment). As she told a seminar audience: “Plastic surgeons want you to believe you have to use surgery to cut into perfectly healthy tissue to get your face to look young again. They are wrong. My name is Cynthia Rowland and I am on an antiaging mission.”

Rowland lives in Southern California, but she happened to be coming to the East Coast and agreed to meet me for a workout session—if I vowed to do her resistance-training exercises in preparation. She wanted my face, if not buff, at least in decent condition. As she proselytized about the remarkable improvement possible with her routine, I sincerely believed I’d do the facial aerobics she prescribed. “I’ll work out night and day,” I vowed. And I intended to, really, except that when her “Facial Magic” DVD arrived, with its rigorous jowl and nasolabial-fold routines, I was so intimidated that I stashed it away and repaired to the bathroom to apply an extra dose of antiwrinkle formula.

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