As if post-holiday blues weren’t bad enough, for many, heading back to work after a streak of late nights, comes with a side of fries tired eyes. We spoke to Dr. Cat Stone, founder of The Face Place, to get her advice on combatting signs of eye fatigue, as well as dryness during summer.
BD: What causes tired looking eyes?
Dr. Cat: As we age, the bony foundation of the skull around the eyes starts to resorb, meaning our eye sockets get bigger, the eye starts to sink back and look smaller, and we develop hooding of the eyelids and hollowing under the eyes. Volume loss in the temple and cheek can exacerbate this as the tissues around the eye lose their support.
The skin around the eyes is also the thinnest skin in the body, so is often the first to show the signs of stress, alcohol, poor food choices, lack of sleep, and age. The fluid balance is this area is often precarious, and the slightest poor health, allergies or fluid retention can show up in this area as puffiness, which can also make us look tired.
BD: Do you have any tricks for alleviating tired eyes?
Dr. Cat: There are definitely a few tricks you can try to help minimise signs of fatigue.
- Lymphatic drainage – if you have puffy or swollen eyes, try rolling the heel of your hand very gently along the bone from the inner under eye to the outer under eye. It not only feels nice, it helps the body clear any excess lymph and toxins that might be accumulating there.
- Take antihistamines – especially loratadine (Clarytyne) which also reduces swelling
- Get a fabulous eye cream – we love Environ Skin Essentia Antioxidant & Peptide Eye Gel or Cosmedix Eye Doctor Rx.
- Thicken the skin around the eyes with Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) or the Vampire Facial Plus, both of which use the healing parts of your own blood to regenerate the very thin eyelid tissue, reducing the crepeyness of the skin. With PRP it not only looks younger, the tissues become younger.
- Lift your brows with wrinkle relaxers or fillers (these are advanced techniques, so you must see a highly experienced clinician) to help reduce eyelid heaviness.
- If you have hollow under eyes, filler treatments can give you instant gratification. Sometimes you might be best to support the surrounding tissues in the cheeks and temples with filler first, to achieve a better result. Only highly advanced injectors should attempt these treatments
At The Face Place we recognised that this was a major issue for so many people, so launched our ‘Bright Eyes’ package last year, combining our very best treatments for this troublesome area. Improving the skin under the eyes with the Environ Eye Gel, and a course of 3 PRP treatments provides a much better ‘fabric’ that allows us to achieve better results with filler directly under the eye, into the tear trough. If you feel like you’re looking more tired than you should, I invite you to make an appointment with one of our nurses to see if this package might be right for you.
BD: What tips do you have for dry skin during summer?
Dr. Cat: Whether you’ve tortured your skin over the holidays with excessive sun exposure or dehydration from alcohol, or the transition from fresh air to air conditioning has dried you to a crisp, there are some simple, practical tips and treatments to help your dry skin when you get back to the office.
You can try simple lifestyle changes such as increasing your water intake (try putting cucumber and mint in you water, it’s refreshing, and delicious!); reducing coffee and alcohol which dehydrate your whole body as well as your skin; eating more summer fruits and vegetables to increase your antioxidants (they mop up the free radicals that are one of the key causes of accelerated ageing, often caused by stress, air conditioning, or UV exposure); or increasing your EFA’s – Essential Fatty Acids – such as fish oil, krill oil, or even hemp oil, which your body uses to build the fatty sebum layer of the skin that is so important in keeping the water in your skin, and the nasties out!
BD: What about treatments – what do you recommend for hydration?
Dr. Cat: If dry skin is a consistent issue for you, there are several new and innovative treatments that can help.
LED light therapy such as Omnilux or Healite helps the skin cells become healthier by ‘charging the batteries’ – the mitochondria of the cells – with just the right type of light. Healthier cells mean a healthier skin barrier, and more beautiful, glowy skin, by lying under a painless light for 20 minutes on a regular basis.
New injectable hydrators such as Juvederm Volite (and Profhilo, but let me check if I can talk about it) help you hydrate your skin from the inside out. Tiny deposits of specially designed stabilized hyaluronic acid are injected very superficially into the skin, and provide up to 9 months of hydration, collagen stimulation, and improved skin texture.
Traditional treatments such as nutritional peels with lactic acid – derived from milk, which Cleopatra used as part of her beauty regimen by regularly having milk baths – they help to improve skin turnover, as well as enhancing skin hydration and glow.
If you are considering treatments or cosmeceutical grade skincare, it’s important you go to an expert who understands your skin and the treatments or products involved. Used correctly, you can often achieve astonishing results, but in the wrong hands, or with the wrong advice, you might not see any changes, or even worse, could end up permanently disfigured. In New Zealand, hyaluronic injections are currently not regulated, so anyone can inject them, which can (and has) lead to serious problems. Fortunately, with an experienced, well trained injector, the risk of problems is minimised, and they should have the experience to recognise when something is going wrong, and be able to dissolve the product with hyalase. As hyalase is a prescription medicine, we recommend that hyaluronic injectables should only be administered by highly experienced doctors and nurses who have also received training in managing complications and using hyalase.
