WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

Prioritising sleep can translate to real skin benefits in the morning. We ask the pros how to get the most out of our beauty sleep – and why we need to switch our skincare routine to the night shift.

- Sally Hunwick

A lazy Google search on how to get more sleep will generate more than 3.5 billion results. Clearly, sleep – and how much we’re getting each night – has become a modern-day obsession. The issue is that instead of tucking ourselves into bed to get the seven to eight hours of slumber the experts recommend, we’re squeezing our sleep budget in an effort to cram in everything else.

If you don’t feel as though you’re catching enough zeds, you’ve got company. About 20 to 30 per cent of us experience problems falling asleep or staying asleep, says website Sleep For Health.

Saying yes to that next episode of Ozark or scrolling through your Insta feed one more time late at night may feel like a more thrilling option than being in bed by 9pm. But the issue with constantly slicing into our slumber is that it can deprive our skin of its big moment to repair and restore.

“Like our entire body, skin has a circadian rhythm: it repairs at night and protects by day,” explains Dr Nadine Pernodet, vice-president of skin biology & bioactives at Estée Lauder.