Are Your Bad Habits Ruining Your Looks?

Everyday habits can have an impact on your appearance, but there are steps you can take to preserve what you see in the mirror.

- Karen Fittal

Some lifestyle choices, like smoking and sunbaking, are well known to take their toll on your physical appearance, affecting everything from skin quality to the colour of your teeth. But other daily habits – ones that are more commonly linked to heart disease risk and cancer – can affect how you look, too. On the upside, modifying your routines, from what you eat to how often you hit the gym, can turn the clock back on your looks. Here’s how…

TO PROTECT AGAINST FINE LINES

Get a good night’s sleep

Thanks to the way sleep affects three skin qualities – fine lines, uneven skin pigmentation and reduced skin elasticity – consistently poor-quality sleepers look twice as “aged” as people who report sleeping well. Sleep loss seems to accelerate signs of skin ageing as well as weakening the skin’s ability to repair itself overnight. A lack of sleep can have an immediate impact on your looks too, with short-term sleep deprivation linked to darker under-eye circles.

Make it work by

Putting some lavender oil on your pillow.

Breathing in the scent means that you’ll spend a larger percentage of your night in the most restful stage of sleep, so that you’ll wake up feeling more refreshed. The smell of lavender increases activity of specific brainwaves associated with feelings of deep relaxation. Try the LANEIGE Water Sleeping Mask (Lavender), $42 (70 ml), to hydrate and stimulate deep sleep.

TO PROTECT YOUR TEETH FROM STAINS

Change your tea and coffee habits

A glass of wine with dinner followed by a cup of tea or coffee can make tooth stains more likely. The acids in wine, whether it’s red or white, create temporary rough spots and grooves on the teeth, which allows the chemicals in coffee and tea that can cause staining to penetrate deeper.