Agnes Gajewska recalls the moment she started thinking of a new kind of skincare routine.
She was sitting down to dinner with her husband, a chef, shortly after welcoming her first child seven years ago. With her mother visiting from Poland to care for the baby, the couple had a brief chance to unwind and connect, but something caught Gajewska's eye.
"What really touched me then was a lot of ladies, they looked too done", she said. "I'm not judging anyone, but you see those perfect figures, perfect skin, but [they were] kind of unhappy. So I was just wondering, where is the next step?"
Already a sought-after skin therapist and facialist, Gajewska began incorporating elements of face yoga into her work, determined to find an alternative to relying on injectables.
"There is a privilege to getting older", she says.
Face yoga is a form of facial exercise that has existed in various forms for years and involves stimulating the 57 muscles in the face and neck through either facial movements or manually manipulating and exercising the face with hands and fingers.
It's a practice already popular among celebs like Meghan Markle and Gwyneth Paltrow and has taken off on social media.
For Gajewska, however, her version incorporates three tools she designed based on the skin care practices of her native Poland and is driven by a focus on emotional well-being and balance. Her facials are celebrated by Irish stars like Roz Purcell and Angela Scanlon.
Her take encompasses all the connections in the body that lead to the face, not just the face itself. "There is fascia that is connected from the bottom of your heel, and it's finishing on your forehead, so it's going through the whole body. So how you walk indicates how your forehead looks."
Face yoga works by using myofascia massage to activate those muscles, bringing more oxygen and nutrients to the skin while stretching and toning them as you would with regular exercise.
Buccal massage, meanwhile, focuses on the area of muscle and fat on the lower portion of the cheekbone and can give a sculpted and lifted look – in stark contrast to the buccal fat removal procedure that trended in slight infamy earlier this year, which sees the buccal fat pad surgically (and irreparably) removed for a more sculpted look.
The process also involves a lot of fingers-in-your-mouth action as well as pulling and pushing, which could take some getting used to.
It's an intentional step away from the over-reliance on surgical procedures and tweakments, which Gajewska isn't against but doesn't fully get the hype over. She says: "What I really don't get is do the preventative Botox. I just don't get it that they say the earlier you start, the better.
"How I see the anatomy, you're blocking muscles and the body is so smart. Let's say your forehead. If you inject here [in the centre], those muscles are going to be paralysed. But then muscles are smart, they're going to create the line [on either side]."
Skincare is king among most of her clients, she says, as well as a few subtle treatments that respect their faces: "A lot of my clients, they still do tiny amounts of injectables, but to the level that their partners or husband, they don't even know."
Aside from appearance, face yoga is particularly useful for those of us who hold stress or tension in our faces: the furrowed brows, the down-turned mouths, and tight eyes that come with late nights, stressful situations, and so on.
Gajewska says that buccal massage works by "releasing tension in facial muscles" and "also helps clear emotional tension and tiredness". "Fascia holds together the entire body, so keeping your fascia healthy is essential. Gua sha massage stimulates the flow of lymph under your skin."
And it's not just the face. Gajewska speaks about the importance of caring for your whole body through massage and lymphatic draining, which we tend not to prioritise.
"Unfortunately, in Ireland, we don't have a culture of body. People go to the gym, but they don't really apply products on it. They don't do cupping or dry brushing. We don't have the weather to show our body as intensively. Even back at home, let's say from April, you were preparing your body for summer."
Gajewska used to buy body cups and brushes from pharmacies in Poland to give to clients before going on to develop her own, which she uses in her practices and classes.
Renowned for giving her clients exercises to practice at home, Gajewska shares some methods on her Instagram, though for the full routine, you'll need to attend one of her monthly online classes, where she teaches up to 40 exercises and massage techniques you can replicate at home.
In between her explanations of face yoga, Gajewska speaks compellingly about the journey from moving to Ireland 19 years ago, to launching her own business on 26 May 2022 – Mother's Day in Poland – and the risks and leaps of faith it demanded of her and her family.
Since then, her perspective on wellness and living a full life has evidently become a firm focus and is threaded right through her business. "For me, it's the balance, balance, balance. If people know me, they know how pushy I am about my balance", she says.
