Six Types of Facial Wrinkles and What Expressions Cause Them to Form?

Facial Wrinkles – Developing fine lines and wrinkles is one of the earliest visible signs of our aging process. These fine lines can appear in a multitude of places around the face.

Wrinkles form as fat deposits under our skin recede, leaving empty space under the skin. As our bodies begin to produce less collagen and elastin with age, your skin loses its ability to hold tight to your face and form to the now-empty face where fat has receded. This combination results in the skin folding into this empty space, creating lines and wrinkles. People often treat these with cosmetic treatments, but the cost of facelifts and other procedures can range depending on the affected area you wish to treat.

Here are some of the different types of wrinkles that can appear on the face, so you may better understand how to treat and prevent them.

Two Main Archetypes

First, facial wrinkles can be categorized into two main types of wrinkles: static and dynamic. Dynamic wrinkles are wrinkles that form due to the way we move and use our face, in other words, our frequent facial expressions. Usually, your skin forms and follows your facial movements and fade once you stop making them (for example, wrinkling around the eyes when we laugh.). But as the skin becomes less elastic with age, these lines and wrinkles can stay, even in the neutral position. This leads us to static wrinkles.

Static wrinkles are a type of wrinkle that stays permanently on your face, whether you’re making an expression or holding a deadpan neutral face. These wrinkles can form as early as your mid-twenties and get deeper and more prominent over time.

Most facial wrinkles start as dynamic wrinkles before changing into permanent static wrinkles.

Now that you’ve understood the two main categories of wrinkles, here are six specific types of them.

Types of Common Facial Wrinkles

Crow’s Feet

These are a dynamic type of eye wrinkle found in the outer corners of the eye region and are caused by squinting the eyes during common expressions like concentrating and smiling.

Forehead/Brow Lines

When you frequently raise your brow, which often happens when speaking, the skin in your forehead region is pushed up and can result in dynamic wrinkles forming over time.

Bunny Lines

A bunny line is a dynamic wrinkle that shows up on either side of the nose. This is a very common wrinkle as it appears when we scrunch our faces during smiling, laughing, and sneezing. It gets its name from how a bunny’s nose twitches about.

Marionette Lines

These are a form of static wrinkles that appear around the sides of the mouth, running vertically down to the chin region, giving what some dub the appearance of a marionette puppet.

Frown Lines

Frown lines form right between the eyebrows, creating a groove that only gets deeper with age. This wrinkle is caused by furrowing the brow downwards, usually when we concentred on something like a screen or a book, squinting in poor visibility, and as the name suggests, by frowning.

Vertical Lip Lines/Smokers Lines

The skin around the lip region is thinner than other face areas, making it more susceptible to lip lines. These lines are caused by repetitive pursing of the lips when taking, and especially prevalent in smokers, as they pursue their lips for extended periods per day dragging from cigarettes.