FOR a Friday evening, the small, intimate workout room at the New York Health & Racquet Club on East 57th Street was comfortably full. A dozen people sat, their chins pointed toward the ceiling, their lips puckered as if preparing for a kiss.

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Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

Annelise Hagen leads the class.

Later, they took their index and middle fingers and tapped their mouths five times, with the hope of increasing lip fullness and color. If done each day, they were told, it would be just as if they had been injected with collagen.

“The resistance is what firms the muscles,” Annelise Hagen, the teacher, said of Revita-Yoga, which combines yoga and facial exercises and is billed as a way to combat frown lines, wrinkles and sagging. “Each pose, stretch or exercise is designed to relax the muscles and release the patterns people unconsciously etch into their skin.”

Want to sculpture and narrow your nose? Alternate breathing out of each nostril, Revita-Yoga teaches. Have crow’s-feet? Open the eyes wide to smooth the lines. As pale as the winter sky? A dose of downward dog can add color to the complexion while oxygenating the skin.

In an era when aging is treated as a disease and yoga is often touted as a cure-all, it is hardly surprising to see people combining the two. Classes are sprouting up all over the United States and so are books, marketed to the portion of the population that wants the benefits of the knife and the needle without the costs or the risks.

That it works is unlikely, say doctors who specialize in skin or facial physiology. But it does relax practitioners while playing into their desire to do something about perceived flaws in their skin.

“People want a healthy alternative to looking good without artificial substance,” said Ms. Hagen, a former actress whose book, “The Yoga Face,” is to be published this August by Avery, the health and wellness division of Penguin. “And they want to be in control of their appearance rather than relegating it to an authority. I’m teaching my students to consciously release muscles rather than paralyzing them, which is what Botox does.”

The idea of merging exercise and beauty is not new. Beauty magazines have long carried how-to articles on firming up the face. But the concept seems to have become imbued with new energy in the last year.

Frownies and jowlies are under attack at the Lake Austin Spa Resort in Austin, Texas, where guests are led through a series of 23 facial movements meant to release facial tension, lift droopy mouth corners and iron forehead wrinkles.

The Kapiolani Health Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, has six two-hour sessions designed to create “balanced facial symmetry” while revitalizing and rejuvenating skin.

Gary Sikorski, who is certified in yoga facial toning, gives his Happy Face workshop in the Atlanta area. In a phone interview, Mr. Sikorski sounded, well, quite happy. He had just seen a graduate of his course, and, he said, “she had been practicing a lot on her own, and she looked amazing! The corners of her mouth were turned up, she looked younger and was absolutely glowing.”

The latest six-session series, he said, drew 25 seekers of his guidance for stimulating 57 muscles in the face, neck and scalp. Mr. Sikorski sent them home with a 33-page booklet, a CD and fact sheets on nutrition and vitamins. “Folks are realizing the face has muscles and that there’s a substitute to plastic surgery that costs less and can achieve similar results,” he said.

Much less: At $250, his class is a bargain when compared with a laser peel, which runs around $600.

The publishing industry has been quick to sit up straight, breathe deeply and take notice. Besides Ms. Hagen’s book, there is “The Yoga Facelift,” by Marie-Véronique Nadeau, coming out next month. Published by Red Wheel Weiser/Conari Presso, it will have a first printing of 15,000 — large for a small publisher in San Francisco.

“Plastic surgery can leave people looking like waxed fruit and doesn’t address long-term sagging,” said Ms. Nadeau, 59, whose workshops at Elephant Pharmacy, an alternative pharmacy chain in the Bay Area of Northern California, draw a standing-room-only crowd. “For some reason we exercise every part of our body but ignore everything from the collarbone up.”