Face Fitness: Simple Exercises and Rituals for Toned, Glowing Skin

By Patricia San Pedro and Maria Ines Gul

Eat Pretty meets 7 Minutes to Fit in this simple-to-follow guide to facial exercises and clean beauty techniques for healthy, radiant skin.

Take your skin care to the next level with this guide to toning, sculpting, and strengthening your skin using simple, natural techniques. Within these pages, you'll discover facial stretches, massage exercises, meditative affirmations, and clean beauty tips from industry experts that will instantly rejuvenate your complexion.

The 50 easy-to-follow exercises range from the Cheekbone Press for a rosy glow to the Bright Eyes to reduce puffiness and the Jawline Squeeze to ease tension. With how-to illustrations and empowering mantras, this book is for women looking to enhance their natural beauty routine. Ultimately, FACE FITNESS is not about looking a certain age, rather, it's about elevating your mindset, enhancing your inner glow, and radiating that outward to present the most beautiful you.

• ON TREND: Face fitness = the new botox! This lovely little book speaks to several current beauty trends: face fitness (made popular with the help of celebrities like Meghan Markle and Gwyneth Paltrow, and businesses like FaceGym), clean beauty, and non-invasive treatments.
• GREAT VALUE: Facial massages and face fitness services are pricey – a FaceGym class can set you back up to $500! This book is packed with valuable information and techniques that anyone can do at home without expensive products or treatments.
• PERFECT SELF-CARE PURCHASE OR GIFT: A lovely gift for Galentine's, bachelorettes, and bridal showers, and a value-packed self-purchase for anyone looking to enhance their daily skincare routine.

Perfect for:

• Clean beauty enthusiasts
• People who bought Eat Pretty and 7 Minutes to Fit

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Apr 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781797205786

Patricia San Pedro

Patricia San Pedro (aka Sunina Young) is a Mind, Body, and Skin Vlogger. She specializes in self-care workshops like Face Fitness and Yoga Glow and creates both personal and branded content on her YouTube channel. She lives in Miami.

Book preview

Introduction

Being aware of my body and mind—both my inner world and my outward appearance—has been an important aspect of my life since I was a child. When I was just a toddler, my father would make me sit still and explore my inner self through meditation. My dad—who I call ap-pa, dad in Korean—is an eighth-degree Tae Kwon Do Grandmaster. He trained in the South Korean Marine Corps and taught Tae Kwon Do to the Korean Marine Corps and the US Army in Korea. He then immigrated to America with $175 in his pocket to continue teaching Tae Kwon Do at a friend’s dojang in Queens, New York, which quickly turned into his own enterprise. One of my earliest memories is of my father having me sit in his Tae Kwon Do dojang with a bunch of much older children to meditate and train with them. My father was all about relentless work ethic, patience, perseverance, business, good health, and taking care of your mind.

My parents divorced when I was eight years old. My father moved to Westchester, New York, to continue growing his Tae Kwon Do businesses. His daily influence in my life was now limited to when my younger brother and I went to visit him in Westchester just a few weekends a year.

This focus on being attuned to my inner faculties was soon replaced by a focus on outward appearance when my stepdad came into my life when I was twelve. My stepfather was a very big influence throughout my adolescence and into my adult years. He was a well-educated man with a PhD in Psychology. He was always very well-dressed and well-spoken, and he was very focused on appearances. He taught me how to massage the bridge of my nose to make it narrower and less flat. (He was South Korean, and this was common practice for many South Korean parents.) When I started developing pimples here and there, he showed me methods for keeping my skin clear. You may be thinking, A father figure giving you advice on skin care?! Yes! He was well-informed on all things having to do with one’s appearance. He made it clear how important it was to look good to the outside world, which led me to spend a lot of time dwelling on my height, my weight, and my face.

I came to care so much about my appearance that I decided to go to the modeling school advertised in every single teen magazine I read: Barbizon! There, I learned all the basics of grooming, like how to tweeze my eyebrows properly, walk confidently on a runway, and pose for the camera.

I started working at the age of fourteen, and I’ve worked ever since. As a teenager, I wanted to work to make my own money so I could buy whatever I desired to keep up appearances. I lied and said I was fifteen to get a job at Häagen-Dazs. I started an e-commerce website called Sunina.com where I sold Korean jewelry and skin-care merchandise. During my senior year of college, I worked on the skin-care level of Sephora’s tri-level flagship store on 5th Avenue in New York City, where I learned all about skin-care products and their ingredients. Over the following years, while getting my masters in communication arts, I worked in marketing at Shiseido (the beloved skin-care brand), as a marketing manager at a chain of spas, and as a social media director at a high-fashion photography agency. It was around that time that I started to feel the urge to do something different.

I’d recently started dating my then-boyfriend, now- husband, Ray. His passion for his career as a stockbroker made me realize how dispassionate I was about my own. What was my direction? Where was I going?

I felt trapped—I had a deeper desire for myself than what promoting the works of others could accomplish. I wanted to craft works of my own to promote too. But what was my passion? I had to dig deep.

I was already doing a few things on the side—I was helping a friend coordinate beauty events at a photo studio, I was doing my own fitness shoots for content on my blog, and I was hosting beauty events where guests would get mini makeovers, have their photographs taken, and purchase some of the back stock of skin-care products that I still had from my previous e-shop.

With all these side projects, plus a full-time job, my schedule was packed. Keeping my calendar full was my way of avoiding what I really needed to do to heal myself from within. I was twenty-nine years old and anxious about so many things. I thought that by thirty I would have so much more figured out—I’d expected my career would be taking off, that I would already be married and starting a family. I knew something had to change—my spirit yearned for a new beginning.

So, I finally started to take steps toward the life I wanted for myself—a healthier, happier, more fulfilled life. During a restorative trip to Miami with my best friend, I read May Cause Miracles by Gabrielle Bernstein and began to follow her forty days of exercises to begin a journey toward living in alignment with my passions. It prompted me to begin a yoga teacher training course and a training course to lead SLT classes, a workout that