The World You Wear on Your Face

May 7

FACIAL RE:COGNITION

A Well Collab blog series about facial structure as a feminist issue, matriarchal aesthetics, and what your face has been forced to carry in the name of erasure.

How Patriarchy Shapes Facial Tension, and What We Can Do About It.

Feminist facial work isn’t about surface appearance: it’s about releasing the tension that lives beneath the skin. This post explores how patriarchal systems show up in the face — clenching, collapsing, masking — and how a feminist approach to gua sha, structural repatterning, and Chinese Medicine can help us soften and reclaim our structure.

You’re not imagining it: your face is tired.

Not in the way the algorithm means when you’re marketed the serum that makes you look like you got 8 hours of sleep, but in the way your jaw has been clenching since you were 13; the way your neck develops a hump from folding forward after hours of bracing and typing and doomscrolling. It’s the way your cheeks tighten when you force a tight smile in the name of physical safety.

Your face has been holding it together for a very long time.

Most of us have never been taught that the face is a map and the topography of that map is made up of layers of fascia, muscle, and lymph. The face holds memories: not just of everything you’ve been through, but in the way your lineage shines through your facial features.

All of your experiences and the experiences of those who came before you show up through the structures of your face today: written in tension, etched into structure… you and the generations who came before you? It’s all written on your face.

Where Beauty Standards Meet the Body

In a patriarchal system, your face isn’t really yours — especially as a woman. Faces are filtered, judged, critiqued apart. Women’s faces can be seen as modern day battlegrounds between the signs of a life lived and the attempt at suppressing your right to express that.

You’re told to lift, contour, conceal, erase.

But what if nothing needed to be erased?
What if the lines are communication, not flaws?

At Well Collab, I practice a form of facial work that isn’t about changing your appearance: it’s about changing your relationship to your face.

I don’t chase symmetry. I don’t worship smoothness. I work beneath the skin, in the places where memory and structure live.

I don’t do “anti-aging.” I do pro-you.

A Face Shaped by Systems

When we talk about facial structure, we’re not just talking anatomy, we’re talking survival strategy.

Your jaw may have learned to brace because you had to stay silent. Your forehead may furrow because you were trained to look alert and agreeable, even when exhausted. Your eyes may widen to appear open, receptive, and less threatening.

Your permasmile might exist as a way to combat Resting Bitch Face.

But your face doesn’t just express current emotions: your face is cultural. It’s ancestral.

Patriarchy tells us to be palatable for consumption. It insists on our disappearance while also insisting that it’s the backs of women that allow a successful society to thrive.

Facially, this results in very tense faces, that only get tenser when they feel the pressure to look less tense because the tension makes them taste bitter. (Yes, really: some faces taste bitter to me. That’s synesthesia, and it’s why I trust structure more than surface.)

My Feminist Facials, FACEWORK, and Foundations courses challenge all of that.

The Face as Elemental Map

The face is more than flesh. It’s a sacred map that is a reflection of your whole system. Through my Proof of Life® framework, I work with the five elements of Chinese Medicine — Earth, Water, Metal, Wood, and Fire — to understand how your body stores stress and then, how to release it.

Each of the elements corresponds to a part of the face:

Earth shows up in the neck: your foundation, your ability to hold yourself upright, your capacity for boundaries.
Water lives in the forehead: your lineage, your curiosity, your ability to sit with the unknown.
Metal is found in the cheeks: the radical idea that your body is unique and sacred and working with it is how you cultivate your humanity.
Wood sits in the jaw: your drive, your discernment, your need for justice.
Fire shines through the eyes: your radiance, your passion, your desire to be authentic.

When these elements are in balance, they express the whole of you.

When they’re out of balance, they express… well, patriarchy.

Earth can’t hold a boundary. This shows up the sensation that your face is being dragged down.
Water narrows down to protective fear. This can manifest as a constantly furrowed brow.
Metal seeks the perfection. This shows up in cheeks that have gone still in that pursuit.
Wood doubles down in judgment. This is a permanently clenched jaw.
Fire performs for others. The light in your eyes goes out.

What Repatterning Really Means

In feminist facial work, repatterning isn’t about fixing; it’s about remembering. You were never meant to hold this much in your face. The clenching, the collapsing, the over-smiling… these are strategies, and they’re smart ones. Protective ones! They’re what I (via positive psychology) affectionately call maladaptive coping mechanisms.

But they don’t have to be permanent.

This is neuroplasticity in action: changing your structure by changing your input and not through force, but through consistency, curiosity, and care.

Repatterning is the process of softening structures that were never meant to stay rigid. It’s the act of returning to yourself, not just in theory, but in tissue.

This is the heart of my Feminist Facials: restoring structural integrity through gua sha, facial massage, manual release, acupuncture needles, and deep recognition. Not to erase your experiences or you past, but to release its grip.

And here’s the quiet rebellion: when you soften your body, you soften the system’s grip on you.

This Is Just the Beginning

This is the foundation of the work I do with faces.

Lots of acupuncturists offer cosmetic acupuncture, and in that way, sure, I guess that’s technically the category under which my Feminist Facials fall. But it’s still patriarchal. It’s still anti-aging. And the intention behind it is no different than a plastic surgeon coming at you with a sharpie, telling you all the things that are “wrong” with you.

So instead, I built out a whole ecosystem based on my own cosmology that’s based in the medicine I’ve been practicing since I started school in 2010: at home courses to help you unwind patriarchy from the inside out; Feminist Facials to do some deeper fascial and psyche-shifting work; FACEWORK intensive sessions to empower you to piece your connection to your face back together.

These are not skin-deep fixes and they are not passive pampering (though, they do feel good).

The Facial RE:COGNITION ecosystem is a political and physiological reclamation.

In Blog 2, we’ll explore more of the matriarchal wisdom embedded in each element, and how each part of your face tells a different story about who you’ve been and how you can shape who you’re becoming.

But for now, here’s the truth:

You don’t need to fix your face.
You need to listen to it.

This post is part of the blog series FACE WORK: Repatterning the Structures That Shape You.

If this resonated, explore the full arc below:

Blog 1: The World You Wear on Your Face: How patriarchy shapes facial tension, and what we can do about it (current post)
Blog 2: Matriarchal Elements and the Face as Sacred Map: From fascia to feelings, reading the body through Proof of Life®
Blog 3: Repatterning as Rebellion: How feminist facial rituals help dismantle what was never yours to carry