Benefits of Facial Gua Sha
This TCM (or Traditional Chinese medicine) treatment, when applied to the face, has the following effects:
Relaxes tight facial muscles, jaw and neck
Promotes circulation to reduce puffiness and promote blood flow
Smoothens the skin and reduces the appearance of wrinkles on your face
Improves dark circles and bags under the eyes
Your complexion gets rosier and more radiant
Helps clear up acne, rosacea
A few reminders for beginners:
Don’t use the same heavy pressure that you use when scraping the body. For this to work, you need to use only LIGHT pressure. The face is more sensitive than other parts of the body.
We are moving stagnant lymph from our face. We will drain this out via the right and left lymphatic ducts. These are the areas in between each of our collarbones.
All our (light) scraping motions will be upwards. Remember, we are countering sagging so we can NEVER make any downward movements. The only exception is the end part when we do the dumping in the lymphatic ducts highlighted above.
Do 3-5 strokes for all of the areas except for the forehead. You can do twice as many there.
Now let’s start:
This photo gives you the general direction we’ll be taking. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s complicated. Once you start doing it, you’ll realize it’s the easiest thing and that it only takes a few minutes.
Now here are the general steps you can do as a beginner:
Third Eye: Stroke from the middle of your eyebrows and up to your hairline. This area activates healing.
Lower forehead: Sweep from the center of the forehead above your eyebrows going out to your temples.
Under eyebrow: Use the curved part of your gua sha tool to scrape the area underneath your eyebrow and above your eyes. Stay on the bone of the brow.
Under the eyes: Slowly and lightly stroke the area where your eye bags typically show. Start from the side of your nose and go up to your temple. Imagine moving the stagnant lymph from the middle of your face up to the temple and all the way to the hairline.
Cheek: Do the same sweeping motion for the cheek area. Go from the side of your nose, across your cheek, and up again to the middle of your ear.
Mouth area: Do the same for the mouth area again sweeping the lymph upward to your ear.
Chin: Sweep from the middle of your face, under your lower lip and to the earlobe.
Under chin: Scrape from the soft area under your chin to the bottom of your ear.
Neck: Finally, it’s time to scrape from your jaw and earlobe down to the middle of your collarbone.
The big sweep: Collect all the lymph you’ve moved to the side of the face and dump it to your lymphatic drainage. Sweep from the center of your forehead right under your hairline, down to your temple, down to your ear until you reach your neck and terminus area. Do several times for a clean sweep.
Now do the other side.
