We're experiencing longer than usual wait times. Get your visit booked today.
GUA SHA THERAPY
What is Gua Sha Therapy?
“‘Gua’ means scrape, and ‘Sha’ means sand,” explains Dr. Sheel Desai Solomon, a board-certified Raleigh-Durham North Carolina dermatologist. “It’s a treatment that involves scraping a flat jade or rose quartz stone over the skin in upward strokes to relax stiff muscles and promote tissue drainage.”
The treatment is traditionally used in East Asian and Chinese medicine. Some might be familiar with the Gua Sha massage, which treats muscle pain and tight muscles by applying pressure with the Gua Sha tool. The results don’t exactly look pretty, as you can end up with redness and bruising as you heal. However, the results are dramatic, and some have called it the best massage of their life.
There’s also the newer trend of the facial Gua Sha treatment, which uses a similar technique. And while it’s been used for thousands of years, it’s blowing up on Instagram this year as an aesthetic treatment to improve the look and feel of your skin.
What are Gua Sha's benefits?
There are claims that Gua Sha can help migraines and neck pains, among other symptoms. From Dr. Solomon’s experience, the facial Gua Sha treatment has a variety of benefits.
“Just as our bodies experience stress in the form of shoulders hunched over a computer, or headaches from tension, our faces hold stress in the form of furrowed brows or clenched jaws,” says Dr. Solomon. “Facial Gua Sha is a massage technique designed to relieve tension in the muscles of the face, boost blood circulation, and encourage lymphatic drainage to banish bloat. It helps break up fascia, the connective tissue that hugs muscles but can sometimes interfere with optimal circulation.”
That being said, Dr. Solomon says Gua Sha benefits haven’t been clinically studied, and she doesn’t perform the treatment in her practice. However, she says people report that their skin looks smoother and lifted after one session. And with frequent repetition, this can become part of your comprehensive skin routine.