🤫🧏: Does Mewing Actually Improve Your Jawline?
Within the beauty niche of social platforms, trends often come and go, with each offering a different approach to attaining a more attractive appearance. The latest regimen that has been all the hype, especially among eager teens seeking jawline reformation, is “mewing.” Besides tutorial videos and before-and-after photos, some New Lifers have also joined in and poked fun at the trend by flexing their mewed-yet-unchanged side profile online, alongside the emoji caption “🤫🧏” which translates to, “Shhh, I’m mewing.” As the trend only gains traction, many users have begun to wonder if it truly does what it claims to.
Although the topic itself only recently hit two billion views on TikTok, mewing as a form of tongue posture exercise is not inherently new. Mewing is a technique named after Dr. John Mew, an orthodontist who founded orthotropics, a branch of dentistry that treats misaligned bites with the approach of proportioning the size of the jaw and teeth by strengthening the facial muscles. According to practitioners, mewing is the routine practice of pressing the tongue tip to the roof of the mouth against the hard palate. The posture correction and regularized movement are said to exercise the platysma muscle—or what connects the neck and chin—to prevent it from weakening, resulting in the subsequent accumulation of pre-platysmal fat and the formation of a double chin. This technique stresses the influence of proper tongue posture on facial appearance as poor positioning drags the face down and backward. Such would lead to both non-aesthetic and dysfunctional consequences, including having a recessed chin and bite problems. According to popular belief, the regular practice of this do-it-yourself orthognathic (or jaw, in layman’s terms) surgery promises facial restructure and jaw definition in return.
Naturally, people count on this too-good-to-be-true, DIY routine to achieve the same results as a $5,500 surgery. In reality, there is no research to suggest it works, besides the founder’s baseless claim that his children are living proof. According to the National Library of Medicine, 0 out of 23 subjects failed to exhibit signs of altered muscle activity, an indicator of long-term muscle memory, which is essentially the guaranteed retention of a permanently snatched (or defined) jawline. Unfortunately, clinical verification only goes as far as to prescribe tongue alignment as an orthodontic recommendation to correct minor maxillofacial (or jaw and face) conditions but it is not a substitute for cosmetic surgery. So, until mewing is recognized as a legitimate treatment, it is in no way a substitute for maxillofacial surgery or orthodontic work.
For now, it is clear that mewing—due to its lack of credibility and evidence to suggest its surgical-grade effectiveness—is only as good as a quack trend. As with all trends, we must be vigilant in filtering what we choose to believe.
