Lack of Sleep Is Your Skin’s Worst Nightmare
Why your face looks tired when you’re tired
Everyone knows what a tired face looks like. Hanging eyelids, dark circles under the eyes, pale skin, droopy mouth corners, wrinkles, and fine lines—these were some of the cues a group of volunteers interviewed during a study associated with tiredness. The participants were shown photos of 10 individuals, each photographed while well-rested and while sleep-deprived, and were able to judge with a fair amount of precision the level of fatigue of the people in the headshots.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that lack of sleep has such a visible impact on one’s face—more specifically on the skin. “Sleep is our most important behavior; the one that occupies most time and is responsible for maintaining the internal balance, a state called homeostasis. And the skin is the largest organ in the human body, so it is definitely affected when sleep is disturbed,” says sleep researcher Monica Andersen, associate professor at the Department of Psychobiology at the Federal University of São Paulo.
As our society becomes chronically sleep-deprived, with one in three adults not getting the recommended seven hours or more a night, researchers are beginning to investigate what exactly happens to people’s skin when they don’t sleep enough.
