Sleep Shows

Does Lack of Sleep Show on Your Face?

In 2010, researchers at Stockholm University and Karolinska Institutet photographed 23 healthy adults after a normal night’s sleep and again after sleep deprivation. Independent observers then rated the photographs.

The sleep-deprived faces were judged to look less healthy, more tired and less attractive than the same people when they were well rested.

It was a small experiment, and attractiveness is obviously subjective. But that is partly what makes the result interesting.

Nobody was measuring whether the participants had developed a new wrinkle overnight. The question was simpler: could other people see the difference?

Apparently, they could.

Three years later, researchers looked more closely at what observers were actually noticing. After sleep deprivation, faces were rated as having more swollen and red eyes, darker circles beneath them, paler skin, more visible fine lines and more signs of fatigue around the eyes and mouth.

In other words, “you look tired” isn’t entirely an invention of the person saying it.

There are visual cues.

Beauty has spent decades learning how to disguise them.

Does Poor Sleep Affect Your Skin?

The more interesting question is what happens beneath appearance.

A 2015 study of 60 women compared people classified as good sleepers with those classified as poor sleepers. Researchers assessed signs of skin ageing and measured the skin barrier’s recovery after controlled disruption.

Seventy-two hours after the barrier was disrupted using tape stripping, the good sleepers showed 30 per cent greater barrier recovery than the poor sleepers. The good-sleep group also recovered better from redness after simulated ultraviolet exposure and had lower scores for intrinsic skin ageing.

That doesn’t mean sleeping well is an anti-ageing treatment.

It means something much less marketable and considerably more useful: sleep quality may be associated with how well skin functions and recovers, not simply how awake your face appears the following morning.

There is an important detail.

The study was funded by Estée Lauder, and some of its researchers worked for the company.

That doesn’t erase the findings. It does make the commercial relationship worth knowing.

Wellbeing becomes very easy to sell when every interesting finding is treated as settled fact.

I’m not going to do that.

Before the Eye Cream

None of this is an argument against skincare.

The right products can support the skin, improve how it feels and deal remarkably well with the evidence of a night that went on longer than intended.

But beauty culture has an understandable habit of concentrating on the thing that can be put into a bottle.

Sleep is inconvenient in comparison.

You can’t launch a limited-edition version of it.

Of course, wellness has had a good attempt.

Trackers. Sunrise lamps. Weighted blankets. Cooling systems. Special pillows. Sprays. Supplements. Devices that produce another graph to inspect over breakfast.

Some are useful.

Some may simply give you one more thing to worry about before bed.

The problem isn’t the products. It’s the order.

We have become very good at beginning with the optimisation and working backwards towards the foundation.

Koda’s edit goes the other way.

Protect the conditions for sleep first.

A room properly dark rather than fashionably dim. Heavy slate linen if you like it, but mainly curtains that actually close. A little cooler. A little quieter. The particular stillness a London flat eventually reaches when the traffic thins out and, for a few hours, the city seems to have stopped arguing with itself.

Then give the night some consistency.

Real life will occasionally have other ideas.

Sometimes you’re getting the last Overground home through Peckham Rye. Sometimes somebody upstairs has apparently decided midnight is the ideal time to rearrange a wardrobe. Sometimes the streetlight outside has found the one gap in the curtain and intends to use it.

Perfect sleep isn’t the requirement.

Making sleep another elaborate lifestyle performance probably isn’t the answer either.

If something genuinely helps, keep it.

If it doesn’t, you don’t need it just because somebody put it in an amber bottle.

Is Beauty Sleep Real?

“Beauty sleep” has always sounded faintly unserious, somewhere between an old beauty myth and something a glamorous woman in a silk robe might announce before leaving a party early.

The science is less romantic.

Restricted sleep can alter how a face is perceived. People notice changes around the eyes and skin. And there is some evidence — still limited, and in one important study commercially funded — that poorer sleep quality is associated with weaker skin-barrier recovery.

No miracle.

No guaranteed glow.

Just another reminder that skin isn’t separate from the person wearing it.

I started with Skin First. Everything Else Can Wait. because good beauty begins with the skin rather than everything placed on top of it.

Perhaps Wellbeing begins one layer deeper.

Before the serum, before the concealer, before the clever little thing currently being sold as the missing piece of your night —

sleep.

It isn’t very new.

That’s probably why it still works as a place to start.

The night is only half of it. The rest of the day is in Walking Still Counts.

And when it is the week itself showing up on your face, that is in Can Stress Affect Your Skin?

Further Reading

Axelsson J, Sundelin T, Ingre M, et al. — “Beauty sleep: experimental study on the perceived health and attractiveness of sleep deprived people.” BMJ, 2010;341:c6614.

Sundelin T, Lekander M, Kecklund G, et al. — “Cues of Fatigue: Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Facial Appearance.” Sleep, 2013;36(9):1355–1360.

Oyetakin-White P, Suggs A, Koo B, et al. — “Does poor sleep quality affect skin ageing?” Clinical and Experimental Dermatology, 2015;40(1):17–22. Funding disclosure: the study was funded by Estée Lauder Companies and included researchers employed by the company.