48 SKIN CARE
Circadian rhythms, sleep and their impact on skin
n Daniel Whitby - Lake Personal Care, UK
The beauty industry has a long lasting link with what happens to us while we sleep. Very few skin care ranges or regimes do not contain a night cream, a product usually required to be applied before bed time to enhance and complement the effects of the day products (typically an SPF cream and an intensive serum). Characteristically, though not always so, the products have a heavier texture from using a higher content of richer emollients, giving the consumer the perception that the skin is being fed and nourished, working its magic while we sleep. Certainly in terms of moisturisation, softness and firming these effects are well documented. In fact the effects of sleep itself on our appearance are well ingrained in popular culture, the phrase “Beauty Sleep” has been in use for well over a hundred years, being defined in an 1890 dictionary of slang as: “Sleep before midnight, on the belief that early sleep hours conduce to health and beauty”1 and included in many novels of the early twentieth century, for example “But eager as Kate was for her beauty sleep, the light burned late in her room.”2
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If we do suffer from a restriction in our time asleep the effects on our appearance and our skin often manifest themselves very quickly. It is not unusual to overhear people make comments such as “You look tired today!”, or “Have you not been sleeping well?” both of which indicate how easily we innately pick up on the signs of a lack of sleep. This also indicates how very good the skin works as a signalling organ, giving insights into our current state of health and wellbeing.
The functions of our skin can be described as being circadian (derived from the Latin – Circa (about) and diem (day)), they follow a twenty four hour cycle during which the skin alters its primary function depending on what part of that cycle it is in. The basic rule for the skin is that during the day its objective is protection whilst at night it is repair. Further, more specific details on this are given below. In the following article we explore how our skin changes throughout the daily cycle, how a lack of sleep impacts our skin’s response to stress and contributes to an increased perception of age, and how
certain aspects of sleep (e.g. which side of the face we rest on the pillow) may affect the way we look.
Daily changes in skin Circadian rhythms are described as a roughly 24 hour cycle in the physiological processes of living beings. They are often endogenously generated and are affected and modulated by external phenomena such as the length of daylight and temperature. Circadian rhythms are important in determining the sleeping and feeding patterns of all animals, including human beings. There are clear patterns of brain wave activity, hormone production, cell regeneration and other biological activities linked to this daily cycle.3
In
mammals the primary circadian ‘pacemaker’ is the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a tiny cluster of cells in the hypothalamus. Every cell in the body has its own timepiece, the CLOCK gene (Circadian Locomotor Output Cycles Kaput), and its activity in skin is thought to be coordinated by the SCN through hormonal and neuronal mediators.4 The different levels of activity of the skin
November 2018
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