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Michelle Gellis’ Top 10 Facial Acupuncture Points

 

 

I am going to be talking to you about my top 10 facial acupuncture points.

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hi, my name’s Michelle Gellis, and today I am going to be talking to you about my top 10 facial acupuncture points. I am a licensed board certified acupuncture physician, and I teach cosmetic and facial acupuncture classes internationally. Can you go to the first slide? Great.

So when I’m talking about my top 10 facial acupuncture points, these are both for cosmetic purposes, but some of them have spillover into treating neuromuscular facial conditions as well. So the first point I wanna talk about is and you might be wondering, what does this have to do with facial acupuncture?

When you needle shen men, it helps to calm your patient, which is. great when you’re going to be putting needles in their face, and it also relaxes the face itself when we think about our face and our face aging. We might think it’s a good thing to tighten up the facial muscles, when in reality the facial muscles when they’re tight and constricted, then the skin will wrinkle.

So you really want the face to be relaxed when you’re going to work on the face. So my first favorite facial acupuncture point is ear chan men.

My next favorite point when working on the face is gallbladder 41. And gallbladder 41, although it is on the feet, it helps when you are doing cosmetic and facial acupuncture in a couple of ways. Most importantly is it helps to keep your patient grounded because when you’re bringing a lot of energy up to the face and the neck and the head, you wanna make sure you counter that with some grounding points.

So this is always the first body point I put in when I’m doing cosmetic acupuncture. It also helps to relax the liver and spreads chi throughout the liver and the gall bladder channels. And this will help if your patient is very frustrated or angry because frustration and anger can cause a lot of constriction in the forehead and cause lines between the eyebrows.

My next favorite point when doing cosmetic and facial acupuncture is stomach 36 and stomach 36 is probably my most favorite acupuncture point of all of the points if I had to pick one. And the reason for this is, , it covers so many different things. It’s the chicken soup point for acupuncture, and it helps to infuse all of the gifts of the earth to all of the meridians.

It’s a sea of nourishment point, which is really important when you’re working with the skin. You wanna make certain that all of the. Food and drinks that you take in get digested properly, get into your bloodstream and are spread throughout the body. It also helps to tonify chi and blood, which can become deficient as we get older.

We can get blood deficient and chi deficient and by needling stomach 36, it helps tonify the chim blood. . It also helps to fortify the spleen, which is really important because as we get older and the spleen becomes weaker and not as efficient, we can have sagging. So the spleen holds things up and it also is very much integral with.

Creating nice, healthy blood. So holding things up and making sure that our blood is healthy are two of the spleen’s jobs. So by needling stomach 36, you’re fortifying the spleen and the next. Important thing about Stomach 36, which should have been its own bullet, but it calms the spirit. And when you’re doing cosmetic acupuncture, you want your patient to be nice and calm.

My next favorite facial acupuncture point, which is also on the body, is large intestine four, and this is a command point for the face. So I would never do cosmetic acupuncture without needling large intestine for, and it also allows us to get rid of impurities. Not just on a physical level, but also on a mental level.

So really clearing out all of the impurities on a body mind, and spirit level. I. Next is small Intestine six, and the name for small intestine six is nourishing the old. So if you think about where small Intestine channel runs, it runs right up the neck and then up. In front of the ear and it can help with sagging jowls and chin and neck.

It activates the entire channel because it is a sheet cleft point, and it also helps to nourish us in the face of old pain and allows us to. Taken all of life’s lessons from past traumas and it, it really calls on some of our ancestral chi as well. . Next is gallbladder 18. So gallbladder 18, in case you don’t know where it is.

So you go to the center of the brow, and that’s gallbladder I’m sorry, the center of the frontals muscle and. , which is in the middle of the brow and that’s gallbladder 14. Then you find gallbladder 15 and you’re going to go back along the gallbladder line until you are in alignment with do 20, so where the gallbladder meridian and do 20 intersect on the head.

This is where gallbladder 18 is, and you can see it here. And this is the occipital frontal. So the gallbladder 18 helps to benefit the eyes and the forehead, and it has a direct action on that super orbital nerve. So that’s this right here. and the super orbital nerve, which is C N six runs along the Galea epi erotica, which links the occipital and frontal bellies of the occipital frontalis muscle.

So when you needle that point, it helps to nourish the eyes, lift the brow, and lift. The forehead as well.

Next is stomach four, and the name of this point is receive nourishment. So stomach four is right at the corners of the mouth and it helps to treat the mouth area. Lip lines, naso, labial, folds that. Run right into this area. It’s also right on the Modis, which connects the lader muscles on the face. The depressor, anguli, ORs, the resources muscle, all of these muscles.

Calm together right here at Stomach four. So by needling this point it helps to relax the depressor, angular ORs, which can pull down on the corners of the mouth and Ma make us look unhappy when we are not

Next. Next is small intestine 18 and the name of this point. Is cheekbone and very appropriately named, and this helps to lift the cheek area. The way that I like to needle it is I come over the cheek and then I will needle straight up, so I’ll. Go over the cheek and I like to use tubes when I work on the face.

So I come over the cheek and then I will needle straight up right underneath the bone and this will help to lift up the cheek area.

Next is Yu and I do a combination of points in order to lift the brow and the eyelid. I’ll use Yu and Sano. 23 and Blood are two together, and I have a little video here for how I would needle.

Like really like this. What I’ll do is I’ll pull up, but for her I would just use the tube and push underneath the brow like that. So again, I’m not on the lid, I’m underneath the brow. And you know why they called us you? Yeah. Don’t you? . Ouch. Yeah. You. Yeah.

So you could see in the video, I like to pull the brow up above the orbital rim, and then I will just push the tube underneath the brow and then push the needle straight up. I use a half an inch needle. I usually put a little anika gel there because the orbit is very highly vascularized and you don’t wanna bruise your patient.

and then I will push it in almost up to the handle. And this really helps, works on the lader muscle and helps to treat you. Yeah. And then by using some supplemental points around the brow and the forehead, it really can help to lift this area because one of the biggest concerns that. My patients have had over the years is that their eyelids are starting to get droopy or their brows are getting droopy, like really like my last favorite acupuncture point for.

Facial and cosmetic acupuncture is Yong, and Yong is great for a lot of reasons, and it’s right there between the brows. This helps if your patient has any lines between like wrinkles, deep furrows between their brows. You can use Yong. and it also helps to relax your patient and spread the chi in this area.

It calms the mind. It calms the patient. So this is a great point. I use it on almost everyone, even if they’re not coming to me for facial and cosmetic acupuncture. So there you have it. My top 10 favorite acupuncture points for facial acupuncture, and you can follow me on social media. Michelle Gellis on Facebook, Instagram.

TikTok and on LinkedIn, and I also have a Facebook group called Facial Acupuncture, and my website is facial acupuncture classes.com. I hope you enjoyed this, and thank you to the American Acupuncture Council for providing me with this opportunity to share this with you.