A facelift without surgery

Mattster: My lady friend is thinking of buying a face exerciser. She says it will get rid of her wrinkles by building up her face muscles. It’s like a face-lift without surgery. It sounds nuts, but she says it was developed by a doctor, so what do you think? — Bobby G., Vista

The doctor must have had a tough time concentrating, what with all the other doctors standing around, snickering and pointing. But we aging dolts are falling for it. If we don’t want to pay a surgeon to hoist it or smooth it or make it bigger or smaller, well, maybe we can trust that infomercial idiot hawking a plastic gizmo that will rip 20 years off our sagging, wrinkly mugs. (Though, in our eagerness, we fail to note the insidious, universal mail-order rip-off. The gizmo’s shipping and handling charges alone are sufficient to FedEx a Humvee across eight time zones.)

Bobby’s lady friend might be considering either the wildly successful Chin Gym or the popular Facial-Flex. The Chin Gym, “a mini-weight-lifting system,” looks something like a small plastic C-clamp. The top part goes in your mouth and the bottom part fits under your chin. You place little weights on a protruding piece of plastic. Once a day for 15 minutes, you chomp down hard on the mouthpiece and raise the weights, increasing the number of weights as you feel up to it. If you’re given to excessive drooling, giggling fits, or have something else to do with $40, the Chin Gym may not be for you. It’s supposed to firm the droopy muscles that contribute to a double chin. We ran the idea past Dr. Doctor, unfrocked podiatrist and Matthew Alice staff quack, and he says that eventually you’ll be the only double-chinned person who can crack Brazil nuts with your teeth. Expect no improvement in sagging skin or wrinkles.

Imagine, if you can, a ThighMaster for your lips. That’s the Facial-Flex. It’s a springy metal-. and-plastic doohickey — a horizontal pogo stick comes to mind — that you wedge between the corners ofyour mouth, then squeeze and release 60 times a minute for 2 minutes twice a day. Or until you start laughing so hard it pops out, flies across the room, and busts a lamp. But wait, there’s more. For the price of the $69 Facial-Flex, you could get two or three videos — some supermodel doing 10 reps of various scrunchy facial exercises to elevate doughy cheeks and eyelids.

The problem with the Facial-Flex and the videos is, they could create even more wrinkles and lines than you had $69 ago. Facial lines come from making scrunchy faces in the first place — a lifetime of squinting, smoking, laughing, sneering. And face muscles are just too small to build up. (Notice that the judges don’t make Mr. Universe contestants do lip poses? Cheek flexes? There’s a reason for that.) The Facial-Flex was originally developed as a physical therapy device for stroke victims, not victims of gravity, vanishing collagen, and American marketing know-how.