Yoga for a Beautiful Face: Easy Exercises to Help You Look Young Again

On the plus side, "Yoga for a Beautiful Face" is a nicely designed book on high quality thick glossy paper, with quality illustrations and photos. It feels like a sincere, well meaning book.

The title, however, is misleading. The facial exercise portion of the book is the first 45 pages only. Half of these pages contain an illustration indicating which portions of the facial musculature are engaged during an exercise, along with a brief explanation of the exercise. The other half of these pages are images of the author captured at one or two points in the exercise, leaving the reader to fill in the parts of the exercises not illustrated..

There book contains a total of 17 facial exercises. For someone who has never seen facial exercises before, this collection will cover the basics. I'd seen nearly all of the exercises before, mostly in a Cynthia Rowland "Facial Magic" video from the 1990s that I'd picked up in a thrift store. While the presentation is more modern in this book, I think the author would have been better served to create a DVD for this material. I find the old VHS tape's demonstrations of the exercises more helpful and there is more explanatory material spoken in the tape than is contained in the text of this book. However, the book is easier to jump to the exercise you want to do than a VHS tape.

There are an additional 90 pages of basic yoga moves along with some advice pages that seem a bit out there to me. For example, there's a page that links a long list of conditions and diseases with each verebra. in this list, pimples and wrinkles result from calcification of the 11th vertebra according to the author. Really?

Overall, while I would say seeing these 17 exercises demonstrated would be better, this book does give someone a starting point and the explanations are adequate. The rest of the book wasn't anything I expected or needed (I have yoga tapes and basic books already), but might interest some people. I don't think it would be the best general introduction to beginning yoga, but the stretching, breathing, and relaxation exercises shown might be helpful to some.

In Yoga for a Beautiful Face, Lourdes Julian Çabuk exceeded the limitations of her title. She does indeed give yoga exercises to smooth out wrinkles and tone the skin. Each exercise is accompanied by gorgeous photographs that leave the reader no doubt as to how to execute the exercise.

However, our faces are maps to what goes on internally. Çabuk asserts that a "radiant facial beauty stems from a healthy lifestyle including exercise and nutrition." Çabuk lays out an easy to follow daily program that contains proven paths to a healthier existence. Highly recommended!

-Library Thing

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