“Your eyes look tired!” If you’ve heard this before but felt completely energized, you might be dealing with aging skin around the eye area. While this is a common skin issue that most people deal with, it doesn’t have to wreak havoc on your confidence. There are simple, effective ways to smooth and tighten the skin under the eyes for a more youthful appearance.
What Happens to Under-Eye Skin Over Time?
The skin around your eyes is already playing a hard hand. It’s more delicate, thinner, and contains fewer oil glands than the skin anywhere else on your body. It also has less collagen and fat, two essential ingredients that help support your skin structure and keep it plump. As you get older, the skin changes — here’s how.
Thinner Skin
Your skin naturally gets thinner with age. Collagen and elastin production slows down, making skin thinner and drier, so the skin under the eyes is even more delicate than it was initially.
Thinner skin under the eyes allows any pooled blood or blood vessels to become more visible, which may result in dark hollows or that purple-ish hue under-eyes!
Genetics
Much of how our skin behaves is directly related to our DNA. If one or both of your parents have particularly crepey under-eye skin, chances are you will, too.
Your ethnicity may also affect how thick or thin your eyeskin is. Researchers found that people with darker skin tones tend to have slightly thicker skin than those with lighter skin tones.
Dehydration
Being fully hydrated helps keep your skin looking plump and firm. If you aren’t getting enough fluid, your skin may become dehydrated, which will affect your skin’s elasticity.
Oxidative Stress
Damage from external stressors, like UV rays, pollution, and intrusive light, can contribute to free radicals in the body. These molecules cause damage to healthy cells, like skin cells, and the results can range from uneven skin tone to fine lines, wrinkles, and loss of skin resilience.
Lifestyle
Activities like smoking, drinking alcohol before bed, and not getting enough sleep can cause your delicate eye skin to become damaged or visibly puffy or slack. Making changes can help you avoid self-sabotaging.
Your eye skin looks tired because it’s getting older, and you probably haven’t changed how you care for your skin. Let’s talk about changing your skincare game and caring for your under-eye skin.
Facial Muscles
The muscles that are located under the skin lose strength with age. They also rarely get a workout, aside from furrowing your brow or causing you to smile. The muscles support the skin and keep it looking firm, but if you aren’t training them, they’ll continue to lose elasticity and cause the skin to lose its firmness.
How To Plump and Tighten Your Under-Eye Skin
The beauty industry has resources to help you care for the skin under your eyes. Some of these solutions are highly invasive and could damage your skin. Others approach skincare by dealing with the source of the issue, the skin and underlying facial muscles, to help support a youthful complexion.
Fillers
Under-eye fillers target the area under the eyes where volume has been lost. You can keep this area plump by injecting a filler (usually hyaluronic acid) under the surface of the skin. The fillers last about a year, but there is a risk of eye injury and even blindness with these treatments. Fillers must be injected by a trusted dermatologist with proper licensing to ensure your health and safety. Be especially cautious of bargain skin filler, as injections to the eye area could cause eye damage if done incorrectly.
Surgery
A blepharoplasty is a surgery that targets the skin under the eyes by surgically removing fatty deposits that could be causing bags and removing excess skin. This likely won’t help you deal with dark hollows, but it may help reduce the appearance of lines and wrinkles. Blephroplasties are common surgical procedures that should be performed by a licensed plastic surgeon, and are one of the most costly options to target skin around the eyes.
Laser Treatment
Using lasers to treat under-eye skin can help with skin texture and tone. Laser therapy can help remove sun spots, reduce the appearance of dark veins, and even out a rough skin texture, but there are risks for these treatments, too. They may cause skin discoloration or eye injury if done improperly or at too high an intensity. As with all treatments, consult with your doctor to find the right procedure for you.
Microcurrent Therapy
The use of low-level electrical current has been recommended in the medical community for decades. This treatment mimics the body’s natural current and treats the skin and facial MUSCLES.
By stimulating these areas, microcurrent can help:
- Blur the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles
- Tone and contour the skin
- Firm and tighten the look of your skin
Microcurrent is safe, painless, and completely non-invasive. NuFACE® Microcurrent Devices are designed to treat all the areas of your skin, including the delicate area around your eyes.
How To Use NuFACE Around Your Eyes
The area around your eyes needs attention, but it’s fragile and needs a smaller device - like the NuFACE FIX® Starter Kit. NuFACE FIX is a mascara-sized Microcurrent Device that targets the surface layer of skin to instantly smooth lines and wrinkles.
1. Prep
Cleanse your skin with your favorite oil-free cleanser or use NuFACE Prep-N-Glow® Facial Wipes, which efficiently remove makeup, dirt, and oil to prepare your skin for microcurrent treatment.
Mist your skin with Supercharged IonPlex® Mist to hydrate the skin and prepare it for microcurrent treatment.
2. Boost
Apply a few drops of NuFACE® Ionized Super Boosters onto fingertips and massage into clean, dry skin until fully absorbed. You can use the one that fits your skincare routine or your skin’s condition.
3. Activate
Using the Clean Sweep Brush, apply a mask-like layer of FIX® Line Smoothing Serum to your desired treatment area. This serum is essential to help blur the look of fine lines and wrinkles, keep skin hydrated, and ensure proper microcurrent conduction.
4. FIX
Using Your NuFACE FIX device, gently feather around the eyes in upward motions. You can perform feathering motions on particularly stubborn areas for more results. You can also use NuFACE FIX on your forehead and around your mouth to reduce the look of fine lines.
For a naturally perfect pout, flick the FIX® Device for enhanced volume. During your treatment, you can spritz Supercharged IonPlex Mist onto the skin to refresh your Microcurrent Activator during your lift.
5. Finish
When you’ve finished smoothing lines and wrinkles, gently massage any remaining activator into your skin and apply your favorite eye cream and sun protection before heading out the door. That’s it. You’ve treated your under-eye skin in about five minutes without scalpels or needle sticks.
The Eyes Have It
The eyes are the window to the soul, but they might be framed with skin that could use a little pick me up. Keep your eyes looking healthy with microcurrent solutions from NuFACE.
Sources:
Oxidative stress and skin diseases: possible role of physical activity | PubMed
