Facial Gua Sha 101: How and Why To Use It For Anti-Aging, Lymphatic Drainage, and De-Puffing

hi it's Amanda Torres from the curious coconut comm and today I'm going to show you how to do facial Gua Sha now Gua Sha is a traditional ancient like thousands of years ancient type of instrument assisted massage from Chinese medicine it's also used in many other countries in East Asia and the instruments that are used to assist it are what are known as Gua Sha boards they can come in a variety of different shapes they can be made out of different kinds of stones so these two are J - this one is rose quartz they can also be made out of horn you can also use AA super fancy a ceramic soup spoon to do wash off and another nickname for this practice is coining but rather than a coin you would use something like a rolled edge metal lid this is actually what my doctor what my acupuncturist likes to use I actually had some gouache on down on my back and shoulders last week at my appointment and he just used the lid to the tiger balm and it was very effective and he's actually shown me an article than another acupuncturist wrote why they think that this is the best tool for doing Gua Sha on the body now on the face this is my favorite this is my favorite tool but they're all great and they all serve a purpose and they're really inexpensive you can actually buy a set of three like this on Amazon for 20 bucks so why not get all three and experiment and see what you like some people get really fancy I'd like to use two at the same time if you go somewhere if you go to an acupuncturist to get a Gua Sha facial they might do that they may use two at one time it's totally up to you what I would like to tell you so I'm a neuroscientist I'm not a doctor or health practitioner of any kind I'm just communicating with you how I've used these for my better health and my acupuncturist prescribed this technique for me last year when I was dealing with some really troubling concerns with my vision in my eyes and eye strain and so what he wanted me to do was really focus around my eyes and the of my head but and also just to help a lymphatic drainage so without giving you any kind of in-depth anatomy lesson the lymphatic system does not have a pump it relies on our body's movements to flow and it flows towards the heart always flows one way towards the heart so coming out of your head means it's going down and if you look at anatomical drawings and this is in my blog post about facial Gua Sha you can see that we have all these limp all this lymphatic tissue and you can see that it follows this path and so when you're doing facial Gua Sha to aid lymphatic drainage you want to go from the middle of your face out and down and I would also just like to caution you to be careful who you listen to about taking advice for doing facial wash draw because you know like with anything there are people that like to pretend like they invented it like in the last year there are some things on YouTube videos where they would make you think that they came up with this technique that's been around for thousands of years and that they have no one right way to do it that there's only one way that's like saying there's only one way to dance or one way to cook a chicken or one way to give a back massage no no there is a spectrum of methods that you can use I'm gonna show you one method it's not the one way to do it but in my own experimentation with my body and practicing with different tools and getting in tune with what my skin and my face and my lymphatic system need this is what I have discovered works really well for me now you can use this I would like for you to use this as a springboard for you to start practicing and playing and seeing what feels right for you but please don't take any of this as gospel there are a couple of things though that you should know about that are like no nose with facial Gua Sha you definitely do not do it on top of fresh Botox definitely don't do that that's bad you're not even supposed to touch your face after you get Botox so definitely don't massage it you cannot do this on top of if you have injectable fillers because you're going to move them around and that's not good if you have broken skin if you have severe acne if you have other signs of inflammation like rosacea on your cheeks for example you're gonna have to be really careful and you should not do the scraping movements on top of those areas of inflammation instead what you can do is you can put your tool in the fridge or you can have a bowl of ice water some people do that and and put it in the water and make sure you wipe it off and you can just press it into that area of inflammation and the cooling action and the gentle pressure you could do something like this like very gentle kind of stimulation and then you're gonna want to just do the scraping movements around wherever you have that inflammation say for example you just get acne on your chin so skip your chin and just do the rest of your face and your neck if your face is just really sensitive and you cannot tolerate even the gentle scraping then you may want to start with a Jade roller which is kind of like gua sha light is how I think of it I have I see every every day that I do facial Blashaw I see a profound difference in the inflammation in my face I feel a profound difference in the just stagnation that I feel in my neck and around the sides of my ears that I have I get puffiness on my cheeks I have not done Gua Sha yet today so you'll have to pay attention to what my cheeks look like now and what they're gonna look like after I finish so I see those profound differences with blush aw I do not see them with Jade rolling Jade rolling can be really great for working skin care products into your skin I will sometimes finish my wash off session with Jade rolling if I feel like I have too much oil on my skin left over it's a great way to just kind of work that oil into your skin but if you find that Gua Sha is just too intense start with Jade rolling and hopefully with a couple of maybe a couple of days a couple of weeks of daily practice you will be able to implement Gua Sha and I will tell you that so this is a very thin you can see it's a very thin tool this one see how thick it is and this one is very thick I'm gonna link to a product listing on Amazon in the description that is for rose quartz tools that are thicker like this but they come in these three shapes so I got my tools from my acupuncturist naturally but I have some some friends and blog readers who have gotten the ones on Amazon they say they're great so they're thicker and thicker is gentler is less intense I like intense so I like my thin this is like a they call it an H or a puzzle piece shape and this is my favorite shape but that doesn't mean this is the best shape it's just my personal favorite because I need to work on lymphatic drainage and I love how I can hook this in right here and give these I have these chronically reactive lymph nodes behind my ears here that need a little massage and then I can get myself a little jaw massage at the same time and it's just my favorite but this one's also awesome this one's awesome they're all awesome but just play around with what works for you um and I will also say that facial Gua Sha is very different from backwash off so when you're doing it on the back the whole point is to draw out transient therapeutic petechiae which are red marks that can stick around for anywhere for a day to a week depending on the severity and how big they are and your own body's natural flushing and cleansing and how quickly things heal on your body you are not doing that on your face and so there is some interesting scientific evidence that when you draw out those marks on the back they've shown in rats at least that this leads to an upregulation of an anti-inflammatory and cell protecting enzyme called heme oxygenase one and they see this up the regulation for five days after one session and heme oxygenase one is just a profound anti-inflammatory immuno regulator and it also lowers your pain that you feel for you know about a week afterwards and I've noticed that myself when I get it done on my back mm-hmm it definitely helps with back pain and neck pain and shoulder pain and there are some controlled randomized trials that have been done in the West that have demonstrated this and you know a traditional scientific setting so you don't have to take my word for it you can take you can read these papers again I'm gonna link to some stuff in my my blog post that I have about wash-off if you're interested to learn more but so you're not drawing out these marks on the face that wouldn't be very pretty now would it I have accidentally caused some marks on my face before when I've been a little too aggressive so one of the things that is good to remember in terms of technique is you do not you don't want to have it like perpendicular to your skin because you're gonna run the risk of accident only drawing out some of those marks you want to keep it relatively flat or a more shallow angle and you want to pull you don't want to push like this that doesn't I mean it doesn't feel right I would hope that if you do this you're like something feel right about this now think about spreading butter on toast that's how you want to do it and when you do this slower version of these strokes it can be really nice to anchor the skin at the start of the stroke and you just play around with that and see what feels right let me think about anything else that I want to say oh the main reasons for doing this on the face is to relieve tension I mean if you look at an end tamo cool drawing of the muscles in the face there are so many I should have looked up the number of muscles in the face I know there's a lot and they all want attention and love and massage too just like when you want a shoulder rub you know you can benefit from massaging the muscles in your face and again with aiding lymphatic drainage out of the face you wanna like I said you want to go from the center of your face down and then down your neck and then this is actually the subclavian vein is where the lymphatic system enters back into the circulatory system it happens under your collarbone here so and it's right next to your jugular vein anyway you don't need to know all that you just need to know out down so this is a long intro now let me just demonstrate how to do it now I did prep my skin by washing it let me tell you what I used I actually used the cleansing balm by beauty counter to do the oil cleansing method and then I applied this nourishing rose water toner which has hyaluronic acid for extra hydration then I put my serum my intense moisture serum I put my normal daytime adaptive moisture lotion and then very important I finished off with some this is a number three balancing facial oil and that oil is important so that the tools have slip as they move across your skin and then they glide effortlessly and don't tug or snag so the way to get started and ideally you want to block out five to ten minutes of time okay if you can only do one minute if that's all you can do right now then do that it's better just like with meditation it's better to be consistent with doing it every single day even if that means you're doing at a shorter period of time compared to only doing it once a week and you do it for ten minutes okay so if you need to cut any of it out you can cut out the back of the neck and you can you can just do a couple of strokes in each area and just build up from there so it's pretty simple you're basically just focusing on your jaw your cheeks and your forehead and then you're going down your neck and you can just spend extra time in each of those areas to add up to that five to ten minutes but I notice a bigger difference in my before and after photos and I highly recommend you take your before and after photo when you do these like take it before you do your session do it and then take another picture and see if you can spot differences and changes like I said I always see reduce puffiness here I see a reduction in the visibility of the fine lines in my forehead my lips will be fuller because there's not tension I will notice that my jaw my face looks big like longer because my jaw isn't holding tension sometimes I'll even notice that my eyebrows seem a little bit like my eyes just seem more open so fascinating stuff that's all related to relieving tension and moving limp so to get started I like to take the long end and then I like to go up the back of my neck and I like to do these I call these wiggle massage movements at the end of the stroke because that's what this is it's a massage modality an instrument assistant massage so do that use the instrument to give yourself a little massage and then you just want to work your way around and I'm gonna be brief with this when you do it do it longer so I'm going against the flow of lymph right now but that's okay it's not gonna cause it to like back up it's just not promoting drainage but doing these upward strokes is just nice for counteracting gravity I guess is a way to put it but there are some days like today I really feel like I need to do I need to do this I need to go down I just did up I'm gonna go down because I feel it I feel the stagnation I feel the limp that needs to move and flow and you see I'm getting a little bit excuse me flushed that's good that's a good sign um it's part of the reason I'm doing this is to increase my foot perfusion of the skin so increase blood flow to the skin right that's what that redness is so here's what I do I like to like I said cradle this in my ear and this is how I like to start you can start you don't have to start like this if you don't want you I like to just really give myself a nice little massage back there and then I also like to muscle massage my jaw oh yeah I really need that right now so these tools are just great for massaging and stimulating tender points and you know in the frame of Chinese medicine Theory there are a lot of acupuncture meridians that run through your face and by doing facial Gua Sha you are stimulating those points and promoting the flow of Chi through those meridians now I know you might go huh what and I will tell you that I used to be very closed-minded about Chinese medicine too early on but it has been such a wonderful like true blessing for me and my healing journey and I am a scientist I'm a neuroscientist published a PubMed and also a cookbook author I and there's a lot of act there's actually a lot a lot of scientific evidence for the efficacy of acupuncture and Chinese medicines for all kinds of ailments so that's beyond the scope of this video but stimulate those acupuncture meridians is good I promise you okay so you have your Chen sculpting sorry I knocked the camera and then I'm gonna have to stop talking because I'm gonna have to shush myself so this part of my face all along my hairline is always tender and there's acupuncture points there mm-hmm and there's lymphatic tissue that needs to flow so I will even just find those and give them a little bit of massage like this and then I'll resume the strokes you move up again you can do you could do you know ten strokes slowly in each location and move up and you know today I got flushed really quickly and I can feel that my skin does not want a long session today some days I do feel like I could sit here and do this for an hour and you can and if you go get a facial from naturist they may do it for 3045 minutes an hour so when you're doing the delicate tissue around your eye just be really really really gentle you don't want to like yank on it because it's so thin I'm sorry I'm looking over here and not here but I have to look at myself in the phone to see what I'm doing so sorry about that and you just want to go from the middle out and going over your lips is good too to help because you have all these muscles around your mouth you might need to pop your jaw like me in the middle of it okay so you got your cheeks that's all you have to do and then another reason why I like this not just because you can fit it on either side of your eyebrow again be real gentle with this skin here see this is exactly where I was told I needed to do this for my eye health and it has made a big difference and you know what if you're dealing with eyestrain during your work day take your fingers like this anchor your thumbs on your temples you just do this and go under your eyes - ah I feel so good you guys but you cannot you're also getting the same effect it's more pronounced when you do it with the tool and then if you want to work on these um frown lines number 11 number ones or 11s they're called this is the stroke for that you hold your other eyebrow go across like that you just kind of want to you can do this kind of um like fan motion from starting at your your third eye or in Chinese medicine it's the point Yin Tong Wow yeah my skin is done he's done doesn't want anymore but I will show you one other quick move that you can do so you can anchor just pressing into my orbital bone and I'm gonna grab my eyebrow and just pull up that feels really good and I'm doing these little wiggle massages on my hairline and then the other thing you can do with these this notch is go up your nose and then massage these pressure points it feels really good I mean you can also do it with your thumbs it's really great for headaches and eye tension again and there you go and then to finish I like to do this signature closing move so I like to press on that point in tongue or third eye whatever you want to call it it is just so relaxing so relaxing you can keep a tool with you and just do this in your work day if you get like really stressed or upset or anxious or whatever just do this a couple of times I guarantee you'll feel a lot better afterwards and then to close I like to go down side of my face and really focus in front of my ear to get those that lymphatic tissue and I might even do a little more of this and carry those strokes down into collarbone some people call it terminus where the lymphatic system drains back into the circulatory system but it's just right right here under your collarbone and that is facial wash ah and wow I see a difference do you see it in the sides of my face I definitely see that other inflammation has gone down in this cheek so anyway I'm not gonna do the other side because I don't want this to be like an hour one thing you but you saw what to do um like I said this is just one way to do facial wash off hmm you don't have to do these really slow movements the other way that you can do this and I'm gonna I'm gonna do it with this tool because it's less intense but you can you can do like quick quick movements like this and if you're really pressed for time if you really truly only have like an one extra minute in your morning routine then you can have that be with this kind of movement and just do this brief scraping and then scraping down to promote that lymphatic drainage and when you do these quicker shorter strokes you don't really need to anchor your skin and if you want to end with Jade rolling if you want to make sure you work the oil into your skin then it's a similar technique pull don't push you can go up just be careful you don't tangle your hair and that's the one thing I dislike about Jade rolling is it even with my hair fold back I still manage to get little pieces tangled if you want to give your under-eye area a little more TLC you could do that with the Jade Roller be real careful you know what you can even go across your eye if you just use a very very gentle pressure I'm feeling really nice and if you get the Jade Roller that I have it actually comes with this squash all tool so that's pretty cool two-for-one kind of thing all right oh and one other thing I wanted to say is that I do not put on my eye cream before doing Gua Sha I wait until afterwards because I don't want to drag it all over my face but I've been using this rejuvenating eye cream for a couple of years and you know what I actually use it on these 11s on my forehead wrinkles and that's where I've used it every day I don't actually use it on my eyes every day and it has definitely helped fade these fine lines so that's a little tip for ya you can use your anti-aging eye cream on your forehead lines and it'll help fade them at least if it's the beauty kind of rejuvenating cream it will I'm not the only one who's seen these results and I won't be the last either um let me know what questions you got y'all I know this was a little long but check out my blog post for more info and if you would like to see me demonstrate with other tools you know what I should do my next video I should show you how to deal with a spoon blow your mind huh alright thanks so much talk to you later bye

Channel: Amanda Torres

Views: 197,571

Rating: 4.8601093 out of 5

Keywords: gua sha, facial gua sha, Chinese medicine, skincare, natural skincare, non-toxic skincare, Beautycounter

Id: m3ui6l7h72g

Length: 26min 5sec (1565 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019