Much less: At US$250, his class is a bargain when compared with a laser peel, which runs around US$600.
The publishing industry has been quick to sit up straight, breathe deeply and take notice. Besides Hagen's book, there is The Yoga Facelift, by Marie-Veronique Nadeau, coming out next month. Published by Red Wheel Weiser/Conari Presso, it will have a first printing of 15,000 — large for a small publisher in San Francisco.
"Plastic surgery can leave people looking like waxed fruit and doesn't address long-term sagging," said Nadeau, 59, whose workshops at Elephant Pharmacy, an alternative pharmacy chain in the Bay Area of Northern California, draw a standing-room-only crowd. "For some reason we exercise every part of our body but ignore everything from the collarbone up."
Maryann Donner, the group fitness director at New York Health & Racquet, said Hagen's Revita-Yoga class is part of another trend she has observed while organizing the 600 classes the chain's 10 gyms offer each week. "Right now the trend in classes is fusion, the bringing of two worlds together," Donner said.
For Revita-Yoga, "Annelise took her knowledge of facial exercises from her acting background and fused it with her yoga teachings," Donner said. "When she came to me last year with the idea, I fell in love with it immediately."
The class was called Yo-Tox until the folks from Botox had other thoughts. The club soon changed the name.
But is there any merit to these exercises, and will there ever be a substitute for freezing a muscle?
"Nothing is going to have a lasting benefit like Botox or filler or collagen injections," said Dennis Gross, a Midtown Manhattan dermatologist, the author of Your Future Face and the creator of a skin-care line. But there are short-term improvements, he said.
"Facial stretches and yoga temporarily reduce the neurological impulses associated with stress and the grimaces that lead to the lines in your forehead," he said. "The plumping of your lips is more a massage and only adds color for a few minutes."
And once the foot hits the pavement during rush hour, or the BlackBerry is back in hand, the face automatically tenses up, and the benefits of deep breaths and relaxation wear off.
"If you already have a wrinkle or a frown line, relaxation isn't going to erase that," said Richard Elias, an oral and maxillo-facial surgeon on the Upper East Side.
On the other hand, Elias said, there is no physical downside to facial workouts. And, he added, the exercises might help with prevention.
"Jowls, sagging under the neck, creases at the mouth, are all signs of aging that most probably will not be helped by a yoga class," he said. "If you make the muscles in your face bigger it will not make sagging skin tougher or tighter, nor will it help remove fatty deposits. Only a face-lift can do that. When you do a face-lift, you're removing fat and loose skin, and pulling some skin back."
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