What six hours sleep a night does to your face

Sarah Chalmers decided to take part in a sleep deprivation study. Beforehand she had her skin quality analysed by a facial scan, and afterwards she found her pore size had doubled and her skin had reddened.

Here’s what she wrote for The Daily Mail:

Standing on my tiptoes, clutching a family-sized jar of pasta sauce, I stretch up to the top shelf of my kitchen cupboard and nudge the jar into place — a manoeuvre I have completed countless times before.

But a split-second after my fingertips leave the side of the jar, it topples over and crashes onto the worktop, shattering into pieces and splattering tomato sauce all over.

Yes, it’s annoying when accidents happen, but I am taken aback by my response — because I burst into tears of hopelessness. To compound my despondency, I glimpse myself in the mirror. A tired, blotchy-looking face glares back.

I look much older than my 46 years. My eyes have dark rings underneath and my skin is lacklustre, with pores so enlarged I can see them from a distance. To top it all off, a couple of spots are beginning to develop on my chin.

Worse still: this is not an isolated incident. For days now, I’ve been forgetful, as well as clumsy and easily upset. And all because I’ve spent the week getting by on six hours sleep a night — just as thousands of other women do.

With so many of us juggling work, children and social lives, it’s perhaps no wonder that the average amount of sleep we’re getting has declined in recent years.

Where once eight or nine hours was the norm, the number of Britons getting by on five to six hours has risen dramatically to more than a third.

I had no idea that cutting back on sleep by just an hour or two a night could have such a devastating effect on everything from my concentration, memory and patience to skin tone.

But that’s what I discovered within days of starting a fascinating experiment with me as a guinea pig.

‘It is the physical equivalent of keeping driving your car over a pothole, day after day,’ says Dr Irshaad Ebrahim, of the London Sleep Centre in Harley Street. ‘Your car gets more and more damaged the longer you do it, just as your body becomes more and more damaged the longer you deprive it of sleep.’

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