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Anti-Aging and ‘Shut Eye’ – A Year in Review

Skin aging is always a hot topic, and the focus of some serious studies and fun surveys in 2013.

What was billed as “a first-of-its-kind clinical trial,” Esteé Lauder commissioned a study conducted at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The study found that poor quality sleepers showed increased signs of intrinsic skin aging including fine lines, uneven pigmentation, slackening of skin and reduced elasticity.

Allure Magazine’s Aging Survey told us what we already knew and what we hope is true:

  • George Clooney is aging well
  • 42% of women would consider anti-aging injections or plastic surgery
  • Sex gets better with age
  • 36% of millennial guys agree that “cougars are hot”

The St. Tropez survey of British women gets our vote for the most precise result: women look their oldest at 3:30 p.m. every Wednesday. While there are a few contributing factors, one of them is a bad night’s sleep on Monday. According to the report, the effects of lack of sleep take 48 hours to show on the face.

So what’s the take away? Our skin requires good sleep to maintain its youthful glow. Makeup can only do so much. Make a good night’s sleep part of your beauty regimen. After all, there’s nothing more beautiful than healthy skin at any age.

How to prevent wrinkles while you sleep

It is basic physics: If your face is “smooshed” against a pillow while you sleep, you’ll get wrinkles. Night after night shear and compression forces will push, pull and fold your skin to its limits.

Subjecting delicate facial skin to these forces causes sleep wrinkles, which tend to appear as vertical wrinkles on the face.

They deepen and can become permanent over time, unless facial compression is alleviated. However, sleep wrinkles are not the only wrinkles of concern during sleep. The same stress forces that lead to sleep wrinkles can also make expression lines worse, such as crow’s feet, lip lines and laugh lines. Expression lines can become the path of least resistance — where the skin is likely to buckle under stress — making them deeper.

The only way to completely avoid getting wrinkles while you sleep is to stay on your back, eliminating all facial contact with your pillow. In fact, the American Academy of Dermatology recommends against side and stomach sleeping due to the wrinkle-causing “crumpling” of facial skin. But, for most of us, trying to sleep on our backs all night is not an easy task. Even if you can fall asleep on your back, it’s likely you won’t stay there. On average, people change positions 20 times during sleep, and spend two-thirds of the night on their sides and stomach. So, chances are we will wind up sleeping on our faces for the majority of the night, no matter what.

This is where JuveRest® The Sleep Wrinkle Pillow can help. It’s new, patented design helps you stay off your face all night long, no matter what position you like to sleep in. Its soft, flexible, and supportive foam provides for a comfortable night’s sleep while still creating the support necessary to keep you from smooshing your face. The anatomically contoured central panel promotes back sleep, while the side panels allow for comfortable sleep on either side, with numerous features designed to prevent facial compression and unconscious forward rotation onto your stomach.

It’s a simple solution to the vexing problem of sleep-position-related appearance of aging – The Sleep Wrinkle Pillow promotes a restful night’s sleep while helping reduce facial wrinkles. We side sleepers and stomach sleepers can relax knowing wrinkles will be kept in check!

-Cynthia Callendar