Dermatologists envisage your face to be like Earth’s crust, explaining that wrinkles grow along its ‘fault lines’ as the skin ages.
Like the boundaries between tectonic plates, these fault lines are subject to all manner of pressures that will eventually lead to permanent creases.
Sleep is not the only pressure on our facial fault lines. Some wrinkles are the result of normal ageing – essentially, as the skin becomes thinner and less bouncy, your face sags.
Other wrinkles, like the smile lines around the mouth, are caused by our expressions. But sleep wrinkles occupy a class of their own, because they’re formed in a different way: by compression and stress on the face when you lie on it to sleep.
It would make sense that repeatedly lying on the same side would lead to wrinkles on that side, although this hasn’t been definitively proven in studies.
One 2022 study, however, found that people’s upper eyelids tended to droop more on the side they preferred to sleep on.
Patients with a preferred side for their sleeping position exhibited a significantly lower upper eyelid height on that side compared with the opposite side, indicating increased asymmetry – although no differences were found in lower eyelid position, eyebrow placement, or eyelid skin redundancy.
So, what to do about it? Well, Brazilian researchers writing in the Journal of Dermatology recommend that you stay hydrated, which helps to keep your skin cells plump and flexible, as well as supporting its maintenance of natural elasticity and a smooth appearance.
When skin has enough moisture, it’s less likely to look dry or crepey, and fine lines appear softer because hydrated tissues resist folding and cracking more effectively.
The researchers also recommend sleeping on your back to help protect the skin when it’s being stretched or compressed at night.
So, by reducing the prolonged strain on the facial tissues that you might experience from side sleeping, and by keeping the face free from sustained distortion during the night, back sleeping may help to maintain smoother contours and support the skin’s natural resilience as it ages.
Simply getting a solid night’s sleep, without too much rolling around and aggravation to your face, should also help, the researchers suggest.
Though doing that is easier said than done if you’re trying to sleep on your back when you prefer to sleep on your side, or if you have to get up to pee because you’re trying to stay well-hydrated...
Equally, you may find so-called ‘anti-wrinkle’ pillows hard to sleep on – some options look more like parasitic lifeforms than sleep aids – and the benefits are unproven.
In fact, it might be easier to focus on the smile lines instead. Simply remain expressionless at all times.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Patricia Russell, Philadelphia) 'Does sleeping on your side give you wrinkles?'
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