According to TCM, the eyes really are the window to the soul, and the face tells all. Acting as a mirror to the outside world, the face reveals what is happening within ourselves, whether it be physically or emotionally. Through signs like under eye bags, dry skin, red spots, and pimples, the skin on the face reflects our internal workings and can be beneficial to healing.
To heal properly, it is important to consider the 5 element types that people fall into based on their personality and disposition. The 5 elements are wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, and each type has its own associated season, body part, emotions, characteristics, and diet. By supporting your organs through high quality food and processing emotions, the skin will be clear and healthy.
Blocks in Qi, organ stagnation, trapped emotions, and poor diet can cause physical symptoms that reflect on the skin as pimples, dryness, itchiness, paleness, or redness. To help diagnose what your skin symptoms may be associated with, consult a face map. Try acupuncture, cupping, facial gua sha, and proper hydration to aid the healing of your skin externally.
Wood
Characteristics: Associated with spring, the liver and gallbladder, positive emotions like love, compassion, and growth, negative emotions like frustration, anger, procrastination, and indecision. While balanced, wood individuals are goal setters, high achievers, and planners that accomplish what they set out to do. When unbalanced, feelings of stress lead to irritability and a short temper. Physical signs of an imbalance include headaches, tension in the neck and shoulders, and waking up regularly between 1 and 3 am. Excess feelings of anger and frustration build up heat in the body, and if not processed and released, can manifest as a red rash or pimples on the skin.
Food: The best diet is a light diet to cleanse the body of excess fats that can clog the liver. Flavors like sweet and pungent are most common due to the young stage of plant growth. Eat young plants, fresh greens, sprouts, immature wheat, young beets, carrots, grains, legumes, and seeds. Use pungent herbs like basil, fennel, marjoram, rosemary, caraway, dill, and bay leaf. Avoid salty foods like soy sauce, miso, and sodium rich meats, since they are heavy.
Teas: Mint with honey, dandelion
Treatments: Keep Qi circulating through vigorous exercises and sports, get sufficient sleep to avoid burnout, and practice restful activities like meditation or yoga. The liver is an important part of lymphatic drainage, so incorporate facial gua sha into your routine to encourage drainage. Facial acupuncture could also help, since it creates micro-traumas on your skin to promote collagen and healing. Acupuncture also works externally to reduce inflammation and redness, can promote a clearer and more even skin tone, remove excess heat, regulate hormones, and get rid of toxins and bacteria.
Fire
Characteristics: Associated with summer, the color red, bitter flavors, the heart and small intestines, positive emotions like joy, happiness, and love, and negative emotions like sadness, anxiety, and overjoy. When balanced, fire people tend to be passionate, warm, and charismatic, and when unbalanced, can be easily distracted or bored, prefer company to being alone, may not stick to their word, and lack joy. Physical symptoms of an imbalance include mild anxiety, difficulty sleeping, poor blood circulation, or spontaneous sweating. The heart stores Shen, which is your psycho-emotional connection to your capacity to live passionately. An imbalance of the heart-mind can result in a ruddy or very pale face.
Foods: Foods that nurture the kidney- brightly colored summer fruits and vegetables that are lightly cooked with added pungent or spicy flavors. It is important to replenish salts, minerals, and oils that are sweated out of the body with a diverse diet. Serve cooling foods like salads, sprouts- mung, soy, alfalfa, cucumber, tofu, fruits- apples, lemons, watermelon, limes.
Teas: Chrysanthemum, mint, chamomile
Treatments: On hot days, create a cool environment, like eating outside, and serve cooling foods like salads, sprouts, fruit, and cucumber. Incorporating hot-flavors brings body heat to the surface to be dispersed. With body heat on the surface, the body will be less affected by external temperatures. Use spices like red and green hot peppers, cayenne, fresh ginger, horseradish, and black pepper. On hot days, avoid heavy foods that cause sluggishness like meats, eggs, nuts, seeds, and grains. Drink enough water to keep your skin hydrated and supple. Cupping reduces heat in the body, promotes proper blood circulation, and removes toxins from the body. By placing cups along the meridians of the face instead of on the affected areas, cupping draws essential nutrients to the surface of the skin and reduces inflammation.
Earth
Characteristics: Associated with late summer, the color yellow, sweet flavors, the stomach and spleen, positive emotions like trust and openness, and negative emotions like worry and overthinking. Balanced earth people are nurturing, compassionate, loyal, empathetic, conflict resolvers, and great at forming deep and long term relationships. When unbalanced, earth people can be prone to worrying or overthinking, sensitive to criticism, and are easily taken advantage of. Physical signs of an imbalance include poor digestion, excessive burping or gas, poor appetite, cravings for sweets, blood sugar imbalances, fatigue especially around 3pm, mental fog in the morning, and poor muscle strength. Worry impairs digestion by blocking proper absorption of nutrients, causing the skin to become sallow, can create lines and wrinkles on the face, and ages the face and skin. Acne that appears on the back or chest, paired with oily skin, is believed to be caused by heat dampness in the spleen.
Food: Mildly sweet foods, yellow or golden foods, round foods, millet, corn, carrots, cabbage, garbanzo beans, soybeans, squash, potatoes, string beans, yams, tofu, sweet potatoes, sweet rice, rice, amaranth, peas, chestnuts, filberts, apricots, and cantaloupe. Prepare foods simply with minimum seasonings and mild taste.
Teas: Fennel, ginger, peppermint, jasmine, ginseng, licorice
Treatments: Add walking outside to your daily routine to energize and clear your mind through connecting with the earth. Try moving your body with exercises that will calm your mind, like meditation, yoga, or tai chi. Proper digestion and nutrition nourishes the skin internally. Those with spleen-pancreas harmony likely have a happier disposition and look younger. Facial acupuncture can help reduce wrinkles and worry lines by promoting blood flow and collagen production, which plumps and tightens the skin.
Metal
Characteristics: Associated with autumn, the color white, pungent, sour, and aromatic flavors, the lungs and large intestines, positive emotions like connection and courage, and negative emotions like sorrow and attachment. When in balance, a metal person is meticulous and efficient. They are not spontaneous, and they crave order. They are dependable, hardworking, and disciplined. When unbalanced, metal types can have difficulty opening up and sharing their feelings in close relationships, and are prone to feeling sad, misunderstood, or lonely. Physical signs of imbalance include easily catching colds and flus, shortness of breath, congested nose, constipation, dry skin, and tiredness. When the energy in the lungs is low, the skin around the nose, mouth, and neck can become pale, itchy, and dry.
Food: Appetite is stimulated through the warm fragrance of baked or sauteed foods. Add more sour foods to your diet, like sourdough bread, sauerkraut, olives, pickles, leeks, aduki beans, salt plums, vinegar, cheese, yogurt, lemons, likes, grapefruit, and the sour varieties of apples, plums, and grapes. These foods also help stimulate activity in the body, as well as heightens mental focus. Bitter and salty flavors move energy strongly inward and downward. Cook with less water, at lower heat, for longer periods of time. Add foods like tofu, tempeh, spinach, barley, millet, pear, apple, persimmon, loquat, seaweeds, black and white fungus, almond, pinenut, peanut, sesame seeds, honey, barley malt, rice syrup, milk, eggs, clam, crab, oyster, mussel, herring, and pork to combat dryness in the body.
Teas: Rose hip
Treatments: To balance metal, strengthen the lungs with exercises like qi gong. Process emotions like grief and sadness, as it strengthens lung energy, providing brightness for the complexion. Using a jade roller on the face can help combat dryness by gently working healing oils into the skin without agitating the already irritated skin.
Water
Characteristics: Associated with winter, the kidneys and bladder, positive emotions like willpower and calm, negative emotions like fear, shock, resentment, jealousy, and suspicion, able to go with the flow. When in balance, these individuals are easygoing, creative, self-reflective, artistic, have strong willpower and determination, and value wisdom. When unbalanced, feelings of self doubt and fear of failure inspire low motivation. Physical signs of an imbalance include aches in joints, the lower back, knees, or ankles, feelings of heaviness or swelling due to water retention, memory problems, hearing difficulties, or cravings for salty foods. The skin becomes drier and darker, especially under the eyes.
Food: Salty and bitter foods cool the exterior of the body and bring body heat deeper and lower, keeping the body warm. Balance salty and bitter flavors- too much salt can weaken the kidneys and bladder, causing an overconsumption of water. Eat foods like lettuce, watercress, endive, escarole, turnip, celery, asparagus, alfalfa, carrot top, rye, oats, quinoa, amaranth, black berries, blueberries, eggplant, black beans, chicory root, burdock root, miso, soy sauce, seaweeds, milley, and barley. Avoid stimulants like coffee, caffeine, and energy drinks.
Teas: Mint, ginger, dandelion
Treatments: Hydration is essential for healthy skin. Drink plenty of high quality water, take a bath, or swim in the ocean. The negative emotions associated with a kidney imbalance drain the kidney’s Qi and excess energy. By supporting the kidneys and bladder with quality hydration and proper diet, the kidneys can process emotions and gather wisdom, and keep the skin clear. Slow down, get proper sleep, and try facial gua sha. Facial gua sha supports lymphatic fluid flow, which transports oxygen and nutrients to the skin. Jade rolling de puffs, and facial acupuncture can increase blood circulation, easing the darkness around the eyes.
Face Mapping
Chinese medicine understands that all bodily functions are connected. An imbalance in one organ affects another organ, and if one bodily system is down, another is pulled with it. Yin and yang, the 5 elements, organ systems, and the meridians all work together to maintain balance and harmony within the body and mind, and face mapping is a technique and tool used to connect the dots to finding the root cause of an imbalance. Everything that is going on inside is reflected on the skin of the face. Acne, rashes, change in skin tone or color, dryness, redness, or other changes to the skin of the face directly relates to something going on inside, and can be used to address the internal problem.
Source: Dr. Axe
Each part of the face is associated with an organ. Each side of the forehead is associated with the kidneys and bladder, between the brows pairs with the liver, under the eyes connects with the kidney and adrenals, the nose reflects the heart, the mouth and chin pairs with the stomach and colon, and the cheeks with the stomach and spleen. If you have regular blemishes occurring in the same place, consider what your skin may be trying to tell you.
Like a machine, the body depends on each part working correctly to function at its best. Understand the deeper connection between your organs and your skin, and use that to heal and flourish. Nourish yourself with a proper diet, process your emotions, and cultivate an atmosphere of peace around yourself to best bring your body into harmony. Through diet, hydration, facial modalities like acupuncture, gua sha, jade rolling, and cupping, face mapping, and knowing your element, you can heal inside to be radiant on the outside.
Source: Lillian Bridges
Resources
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Gao, Sally. “Traditional Chinese Medicine Tricks to Help You Have Clearer Skin”. Retrieved from https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/traditional-chinese-medicine-tricks-to-help-you-have-clearer-skin/.
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Power of the 5 Elements: The Chinese Medicine Path to Healthy Aging and Stress Resistance- Charles A Moss, MD
Healing with Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition- Paul Pitchford
Face Reading in Chinese Medicine- Lillian Bridges