Resting Bitch Face

I have resting bitch face. What started out as a look of concentration in my childhood, became a furrowed brow in my adulthood. My grandmother used to tell me I was going to have the biggest wrinkle on my forehead....and as usual she was right.

Wrinkles are just timelines on a person. I will not pretend to like them, but I don't hate them either. They are markers of a sort. Age. With age, hopefully comes wisdom. Crows feet? I do not have any of those--mine are called laugh lines. Teeth grinding and tight lips leave creases along my mouth and nose. The #11 that is right between my eyebrows can be a result of stress, lack of sleep, worry, motherhood, but mostly it's resting bitch face.

If people ask you what is wrong or if something is bothering you when you are simply deep in thought or maybe you're just having a lovely daydream when someone asks if you are unwell, you may have resting bitch face too. The downside of this is that people avoid me sometimes because they think I am too intense or a bit intimidating. The upside of this is people avoid me sometimes because they think I am too intense or intimidating. 😉  But as I have reached my fifties and my wrinkles are more pronounced, my resting bitch face has become a bit scarier. When I started deleting selfies because I saw a haggard old woman instead of a somewhat saucy hippie looking back at me, I knew it was time to start fighting back.

Besides really investing in my skincare and getting regular facials, I have been doing self massage to combat this horrible affliction.  I have a rose quartz butterfly stone that I use to promote lymph drainage, an eye rejuvenator/micro-current to fight baggy eyes, and I hydrate my face and neck twice daily, but my newest trick is intra-oral massage. This massage is done inside the mouth and is one way to combat tmj issues and headaches without using medications. The bonus of this massage is that you can treat the muscles used for mimicking and making facial expressions....the ones that are not so attractive in resting bitch face kind of incidents. This is just the second week of my new therapy so I will let you know if I can see results, I can tell you that my face feels much more relaxed after the massage and there is good blood flow so those signs are encouraging.  If you are interested in trying it in a massage session, I promise to wear rubber gloves. lol

Look Up In The Sky!

Heard This Week on the Massage Table

My ten year old client told me she was going to close her eyes but not go to sleep. She barely got the words out before her snoring began.

An older gentleman that I have worked with for 12 years now has slowly but surely came to be one of my trusted advisors on all things--and I do mean all things.  When he wants to advise me but is not sure how I will react he always says "If you ask me my opinion, I will tell you what I think." So he is concerned about me being single now and likes to ask me what I have done since he saw me last. Nine times out of ten I tell him I sat on the sofa and binge watched something to rot my brain. Last visit, after I tell him my boring life details he says "I keep coming in here every week and hoping that you will tell me you got wild and went out and did something exciting. Can you work on that please?"

"You have a gun....in your dining room." Reaction to seeing my pretty pink bb gun.

One of my trade buddies and I have been experimenting with intra-oral massage. The idea is that if you release all the mimic muscles, the muscles that allow us to make expressions, you get a natural facelift. It is also effective for TMJ and headache relief. Last week when we traded she told me that she thought she had been too aggressive with her jaws and had pain that referred to the top of her head. So I started palpating around the muscles that she thought she had injured, but was unable to find anything out of the ordinary. When I felt the top of her head I found a huge bump. I told her that it felt more like she had knocked her brains loose on something rather than her facial massage. She immediately started laughing and said "Oh my god! I forgot that I hit my head on an open cabinet door the other day! Let's go with your findings, it's so much better than me hurting myself."