You might not care about your sleep—or at least you might not think you do.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” you may mutter to yourself as you sip your coffee morning, noon and night.
But perhaps you do care about your physical appearance. (Let’s be honest: most of us do to some degree.) Believe it or not, your sleep impacts your looks. And we’re not just talking about weight gain, folks.
Think beauty sleep is a myth? Think again.
All of those fairytale princesses had to have their beauty sleep for a reason: wrinkles, spots and bacteria on your face are just some of the things affected by sleep—or lack thereof.
More precisely, recent research by the Sleep School in London found that getting more sleep limits those skin effects that so many of us try to ward off with fancy skin cleansers and moisturizers and creams.
The study measured the effects of a workweek’s worth of sleep deprivation on 30 women, photographing them before and after and testing their skin for shifts such as enlarged pores or spots.
The results showed that just two fewer hours of sleep at night—six hours rather than eight—for a week meant a 45-percent increase of fine lines and wrinkles, a 13-percent increase of spots, a 16-percent increase in bacteria on the skin and an 8- and 11-percent increase, respectively, in red and brown areas. Yikes!
Not only that, but apparently sleep impacts self esteem, too. Everyone who participated reported feeling less attractive after the sleep loss.
This research isn’t alone in pointing to the link between sleep and beauty. A 2013 study in the journal Sleep found, unsurprisingly, that sleep-deprived people had red, swollen eyes, dark circles under their eyes and droopier, more wrinkled skin.
“If we take sleep as a wider concept, it is effectively when the human body repairs, grows, regulates our emotions, and controls our appetite — so it’s hardly surprising that it has a strong impact on our skin,” Guy Meadows, founder of the Sleep School where the research was conducted, told Yahoo Health.
He theorized that, because much of the collagen needed for healthy, vibrant skin is produced at night, less sleep means less collagen. Sleep deprivation can also lead to excess amounts of the stress hormone cortisol, which interferes with collagen production.
So a little more shuteye makes life more beautiful in quite a few ways. And there you have it! Just one more reason to invest in sleeping well.
Sleep tight, Urbanites!