Pillow Talk! May 2019 At Oleander Aesthetics

If we don’t already have enough to worry about when it comes to skin aging and acne it turns out that perhaps how we sleep and the pillow we use can hurt our skin.
You spend approximately 2,500 hours per year spent curled up with it, so good decisions matter depending on your skin concerns and what you’re looking to prevent or improve.

If you’re prone to breakouts…

Many people don’t realize this, but when sleeping on your pillowcase for 7-8 hours a night, you are transferring a lot of oil from both your hair and face onto the pillowcase. Oil ends up on your face when you sleep on your stomach or side. And because oil breeds bacteria which then leads to breakouts, it only makes sense that you’d want to sleep on a clean pillowcase every night.

You can get two nights out of the same pillowcase by sleeping on one side of the pillow on one night and then flipping it over on the second night. After two nights, you’ll want to replace your pillowcase with a fresh, clean one.

And of course cleansing your skin before you go to bed to remove the day’s dirt, bacteria, germs and makeup is essential to keep breakouts under control. A day’s worth of oil on the skin (and bacteria from touching your face all day) will cause more breakouts than just a dirty pillowcase, so please make sure you are diligent about washing your face daily.  Especially before bed!

If tired, puffy, fine lines and dehydrated skin have you down…

For under eye puffiness…you’ll want to sleep on two pillows at night. The theory here is that when your head is elevated, it helps to reduce fluid retention so you’re less puffy both in the face and under the eyes in the morning.

When you sleep, your skin is potentially pressed for hours against a wrinkled fabric while the body’s natural nightly water loss from the skin is further increased by the absorbent property of cotton and other fabrics. These factors combine to produce what science calls compression defects in the skin. We call them sleep lines. Not only can sleep lines last for hours, more seriously, they mean that you have stretched and dehydrated your skin.

If you have sallow, tired-looking skin you’ll want to sleep on a single pillow that is thinner with a low elevation. The theory here is that during the daytime hours, you’re in an upright position for 16 hours and the blood can move away (downward) from the face making the skin look pale and tired in people who are genetically prone to this. So, at night, you want to have your head as flat as possible to re-balance that flow and stimulate circulation to the face to give an inner glow.

Of course, you may toss and turn throughout the night so who knows what happens once you are truly asleep, but when you turn the lights out, I truly believe that giving some good thought to your sleep position is important for wrinkle prevention.

-Happy Spring,  Emma at Oleander