Imagine a world without creams, without fillers, without Botox. Our beauty industry is saturated with £800 billion worth of products like these, with demand growing alongside our exposure to more ‘perfect’ faces, more anti-ageing solutions, and the perception drift that comes along with it all. Buying products that promise to help us reach increasingly ambitious beauty standards is a sure-fire dopamine hit for our addicted brains, yet we’re constantly chasing our tail: beauty critic Jessica Defino once noted that many of the beauty products we buy exist to solve problems caused by other products. Most freeing of all would, obviously, be to reject beauty standards entirely. But what if we could somehow escape this never-ending product loop while achieving the beauty goals we aspire to?
That’s the dream sold by Anastasia Beauty Fascia, the rapunzel-haired poster girl for the latest quasi-scientific beauty hack to hit TikTok and Instagram feeds: fascial massage. In a string of viral videos, Anastasia takes users through the journey of her staggering facial transformation, and how an understanding of the body’s mysterious ‘fascia system’ is what led her to get there. Through physiotherapy techniques like myofascial release, she claims to reverse the tension caused by our modern day posture, relaxing the fascia to reverse wrinkles and increase blood flow, lymphatic drainage and collagen production. This, she says, offers a legitimate alternative to the tweakments many are undergoing in pursuit of everlasting youth.
Massage-adjacent beauty techniques are obviously nothing new. Face yoga, gua sha and traditional face massages have inserted themselves into late-stage wellness to varying degrees of success. But while these techniques have been around for centuries and beyond, fascial manipulation has only just been discovered, mainly down to the fact that fascia can’t be detected on traditional MRI scanning machines. ‘‘Fascia is recognised as a connective tissue and is primarily composed of collagen, the protein that has a heavy role in ageing of organs like the skin. It envelops just about every structure (bone, muscle, organs) giving it support as well as enabling musculoskeletal structures to move over each,” Professor Adam Taylor, anatomy expert at the University of Lancaster, tells me.
Anastasia makes a convincing advert for the part fascia plays in the way we look, explaining how this emerging anatomical understanding can be applied directly to our faces, solving issues we never knew we had. Her videos are a triple threat for an audience of women who have never understood their own beauty better, or been prepared to go to such lengths to achieve it: highly detailed tutorials peppered with anatomical terms like ‘trapezius’ and ‘masseter’, a host of breathtaking before-and-afters, and, most strikingly of all, her gravity-defying (and supposedly all-natural) Barbie-like beauty.
It’s no wonder that she’s convinced hundreds of women to take part in her $300 dollar monthly ‘Glow Up’ course, which comprises 30-days of pre-recorded tutorials, with many of them sharing their own convincing results: jawline tightened, nasolabial folds erased, eye bags dissolved. In the intro video to her programme, Anastasia explains how she believes women are being conned by the beauty industry: we don’t need to spend money on expensive creams and treatments, we simply need to stimulate our blood flow and release the tension in our perpetually screen-strained faces. To some, those $300 dollars tell a different story.
It’s this commercial hypocrisy, along with Anastasia’s complete anonymity, dubious qualification from pseudoscientific body the International Association of Structural Integrators, and hyper-defensive retaliations to any claims that she’s had work done, that has launched a slew of conspiracies on Reddit. The worst claim that Anastasia has had multiple cosmetic procedures and that her followers are bots (an impressive feat given the sheer number of convincing testimonies she produces), the best that she’s a savvy business woman simply maximising her profits. It’s hard to decide which is more cynical: the Reddit users trying to oust Anatasia for lying, or Anastia’s own profit-making. Each is indicative of the complete mistrust the wellness industry has fostered.
@anastasiabeautyfascia 💆♀️ We all know that our scalp is not disconnected from our face. So in order to create a face lift effect you’ll need to work on your whole head, which is your: ✅ Scalp ✅ Temporalis ✅ Back of the Head Yes, that will lift your face! This particular technique helps the part that holds the most tension. It’s where your hair meets your forehead. It’s important to address that area to get that face lift effect! And if you want a step-by-step 30-Day Face Transformation Program packed with powerful techniques, enrollment is OPEN right now. ⚠️ Spots are filling up fast, and we’re on track to close enrollment early so make sure to not miss out! #facemassage#facesculpting#naturalfacelift#selfcare#selfmassage#beautyhacks ♬ original sound – Mia Negovetic
But what if we remove the capitalistic business model that Anastasia is levering? If her claims are true, the emerging science of fascia could explain why our tech-riddled lifestyles (and the stress it puts on our face, neck and circulation) causes so many of our beauty woes, and offer solutions to solve them. It’s this understanding which could threaten to derail so much of what the industry thrives upon: a constant stream of sticking plasters that never quite get to the root cause. “There is a growing recognition that fascia has a role in helping eliminate muscle injuries or chronic pains,” says Professor Taylor. But “there is limited, if any, evidence of the effectiveness of myofascial massage in relation to ageing or beauty treatment”.
While academic studies are still lacking, anecdotal endorsements are stacking up. Dr Liza Egbogab, a Canadian osteopath and posture expert who has a doctor of chiropractic, has used fascial techniques to help people like Jennifer Lawrence and George Clooney with their posture. She tells Dazed, “if we were to remove all of your bones, you would still maintain most of your shape because of fascia. As such, fascia can be manually manipulated to change our appearance and structure.” Dr Egbogah says that many signs of “ageing” in our modern digital age are from stress and spending too much time looking down at phones and computers. “This behaviour changes our facial posture because knots in the fascia developed from looking downwards will also pull your face down as well,” she says. “Myofascial release can counteract these effects. Even wrinkles can be a result of knots in the fascia and when you release those knots the wrinkles can essentially be erased.”
The jury might be out on Anastasia’s business model, but I have to admit I noticed a change in my own face shape, hair growth and fine lines in the short time I trialled it. My personal verdict? Her techniques may or may not work for you, and she does indeed uphold unrealistic beauty standards (god knows whether she’s had surgery or not), but she’s not a total scam. After all, there’s something we can all learn from fascia. While Botox or surgery hold the convenience of a quick fix, understanding the science of fascia could potentially transform the way we think about our lifestyle’s impact on ageing, helping us achieve results for our posture, skin health, and wellbeing that many of us are looking for. One thing’s for sure, there’s no need to spend money on any unnecessary creams or treatments in the process. Maybe it’s time we finally stepped out of the beauty loop: as Anastasia says, your own blood-flow is the best skincare product of them all…
