Sleep wrinkles are wrinkles you form from sleeping. For those of us who cannot sleep with our face up toward the ceiling (oh how I am jealous of you who can!), we are smashing our faces into pillows. For hours. Each night. One promo for a sleep pillow tells us our heads weigh 6-8 pounds, and all that weight is causing us to iron wrinkles into our skin.
Now I don’t know how much I believe in that, but I do think our skin changes as we age, and our ability to “iron out” those sleep wrinkles gets harder. I look at my kids with their awesome skin tone, non sun-damaged skin, and lots of fullness, and they never have a sleep wrinkle. As we age, our skin tone worsens; we lose subcutaneous fat; and our ability of the skin to bounce back to form declines.
So the question is, can using a special pillow help with sleep wrinkles? First see my prior blog on how to figure out if your wrinkle is from sleep or not. If your wrinkle is from sleep, then a whole new industry is cropping up with special pillows to help you.
Recently I saw a Yahoo article on special sleep pillows which stop the aging process. One is even designed by a plastic surgeon. The article was entitled “REDUCE WRINKLES WHILE YOU SLEEP.” Wow! Sign me up! The basic purpose of the pillows is to keep pressure off the cheek. I don’t know if they work or if a $100 one is better than the $25 one.
I don’t think they will reverse wrinkles. But I do have patients who swear by them for not forming the sleep wrinkles while you sleep. And the fewer wrinkles we form while sleeping the better.
Interesting topic. If you have any thoughts, please share.