Soothe tension with expert-backed techniques to relax facial and neck muscles, reduce stress, and restore natural glow.
These are stressful times. If we can all agree on anything, it’s that. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association’s most recent mental health poll found that 43% of adults felt more anxious in 2024 than the previous year. According to the Mayo Clinic, unchecked stress can wreak havoc on our wellbeing, triggering issues from headaches and pain to insomnia and a weakened immune system, not to mention the enormous emotional toll. But what we may not realize is how much we hold that tension in our bodies—especially in our faces and necks.
Fortunately, help has arrived, and from an unexpected source: estheticians.
Once, we relied on skincare experts for purely esthetic assistance, managing blemishes or signs of aging with extractions, masks, lotions, and potions. Today, the role of the more holistic among them has become more complex—as have our needs.
As it turns out, touch therapies such as facial massage, muscle stimulating tech, and lymphatic drainage can work on multiple levels to both enliven the skin from the inside out and calm the parasympathetic nervous system (which helps regulate stress via cortisol levels). “In a world that is constantly pushing us to do more and go faster, more people are turning to relaxing self-care treatments, not as an indulgence, but as a vital form of healing and nervous system regulation,” explains Lili Mineni, a beauty world veteran with a private skincare clinic in Santa Monica, California. “The intricate structure of muscles and fascia influence how your face looks, feels, and ages. The face and neck are emotional landscapes wired directly to the brain, shaped by feelings, and sculpted by our stress patterns.”
In other words, this growing emphasis on working with the deeper layers of the skin and muscles of the face and neck can make us both look and feel better—and those factors are inextricably linked.
Like many estheticians practicing this type of integrative work, Mineni first began exploring the relationship between musculature and skin health when she was introduced to microcurrent—a noninvasive holistic facial treatment that uses gentle electrical currents to stimulate the skin and facial muscles. “It’s like a workout for the face with deep rejuvenating benefits,” she describes. She quickly discovered that integrating LED lights only amplified the benefits.
That realization—combined with observing an increase in asymmetrical aging which she attributes to everything from poor circulation to unresolved emotions—inspired her to continue down this holistic avenue, integrating modalities like lymphatic drainage, gentle massage, reflexology, reiki, biomagnetism, gua sha and fascia release. (Fascia is the continuous web of connective tissue that wraps around every muscle, bone, nerve, and organ in your body, and moves blood, lymph, and water to areas that need repair or cellular energy.) “My treatments have evolved into science and soul,” Mineni says. “The muscles in the face and neck are directly wired to the brainstem and cranial nerves, deeply influenced by emotions and stress. This connection is both anatomical and energetic. Your facial structure doesn’t just show how you feel; it actually helps process, store, and release your emotional and nervous system patterns.” More specifically, she explains, healthy muscles and fascia support the structure, tone, fluid movement, and natural lift of the muscles and skin. Stuck or weak muscles and fascia cause sagging, puffiness, asymmetry, and wrinkles.
In Mineni’s experience, clients see an immediate improvement in muscle tone, facial contours, puffiness, lines, texture, and, last but not least, emotional release. Relaxing these muscles seems to create a groundedness. “You can see it in the eyes,” she notes. “You’re not just relaxing the body. You’re inviting the person back home to themselves.”
Though the ethos is consistent, each esthetician with this touch focus handles it differently. For example, Carrie Lindsey—founder of skin studios in both Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as popups from Montecito to Berlin—developed her particular lens after training first in Polish practices and then with a French esthetician who focused largely on the lymphatic system. Today, Lindsey combines those foundational ideologies with Yakov Gershkovich’s sculptural facial lifting techniques and Core Energetics, a form of body-centered, psychotherapeutic-meets-spiritual therapy (around the interconnectedness of the body, emotions, mind, will, and spirit) to address both physical tension and emotional blockages.
Lindsey—who also offers an Intra-Oral massage add-on that stimulates lymphatic drainage and softens expression lines—is particularly interested in the role of the jaw. “It’s how we nourish and express ourselves. It’s how we connect with others,” she says. “Think about people who hold things back or, conversely, say too much. It’s all connected to the mouth. Add in the way people hold stress in their neck and shoulders. It’s all there.” Appearance-wise, she says tension can create a shortening of the muscles in the neck and tightening around the mouth, which can shrink the mouth and the lips. So, through massage, she works to soften and plump the lips as well as elongate the neck, relaxing and lifting the muscles, simultaneously. “[Afterward], it looks as if the client just woke up from a great night’s sleep,” she muses.
"The intricate structure of muscles and fascia influence how your face looks, feels, and ages,”
—Lili Mineni, esthetician, Lili Mineni salon
At home, Lindsey recommends leaving a gua sha tool by your bedside or couch within easy reach as you watch TV. She’s also a big proponent of the forward fold to release the neck and jaw muscles. “Standing and hanging over one’s legs stretches the spine all the way up into the occipital ridge,” she explains.
Laurie Adams, esthetician and founder of Lany Organics in Manhattan, says her practice has also evolved from a classic European facial technique to include modalities for working with the muscles of the face and neck—and she has a rainbow treasure trove of facial tools to prove it. She incorporates acupressure, traditional massage, jade rolling, gua sha, aromatherapy, warming tools, singing bowls, and tuning forks to address tension in the brows, jaw, temples, under the cheekbone, along the hairline, and at the front and back of the neck. This does everything from stimulate microcirculation and lessen puffiness to decrease inflammation.
Not only do clients love the massage, but also she’s noticed them unconsciously taking deep breaths as soon as she makes contact. “We have over 60 muscles in the face and neck,” she explains.
“Oftentimes, clients aren’t even aware of just how tight their muscles are until they are touched. If the body is in pain, the mind is, as well,” she notes. “And we will show it in our faces.”
Tension can create a shortening of the muscles
in the neck and tightening around the mouth,
which can shrink the mouth and the lips.
Marie-Emma Graves and her partner Molly Watman—the founders of Brooklyn Herborium in New York with locations in the neighborhoods of Columbia Waterfront and Windsor Terrace— not only practice holistic principles in their facial offerings, they teach them through an apprenticeship program. Graves was first introduced to facial reflexology more than 20 years ago while in the South of France learning to distill essential oils. When she returned to New York, she went to work for a Chinese Medicine-based spa, using jade rollers, gua sha, phototherapy and microcurrent long before they were on trend.
Today, first and foremost, she nourishes skin function over time before introducing small “challenges”—like exfoliation, LED or microcurrent— to address uneven texture, old scars, damage, wrinkles, and dark spots. But, though individualized, every treatment includes neck/shoulder massage, facial reflexology, and lymphatic drainage. “We send subtle messages through the nervous system to tell the body to move into…deep relaxation,” explains Graves, “so that the immune system can take note of the affected areas and calmly respond by creating new and improved skin.”
In addition to immediate improvements, Graves says the real results come in the rest period after the practitioner sets the stage and then “gets out of the way” to let the body recover and increase in strength and resilience. (This is why she sends clients home with worksheets.) The ideal result is what she calls, “Resting Peace Face,” where the face looks energetic even when at rest and the skin projects an innate glow from healthy cells at work.
“We tend to forget that all the body systems are… in a dynamic dance where one affects the other,” Graves reminds us. “The benefits of this holistic way of working with massage is twofold: Clients who come in looking for an esthetic boost are pleasantly surprised at how great they feel…and clients who come in to relax, return for their next appointment wowed at the improvements in their appearance.”
