What happens to your skin when you sleep with makeup on?

The relationship between you and your bed, is nothing short of a love story – just ask Drake. Your bed is the first thing you think of when you leave the house, and you spend the whole day longing for it. So naturally when you come home from a I’m-just-staying-for-one-drink-but-actually-stay-for-10 session, it can be tempting to cuddle up with your lover and forget everything else. Including your makeup. Surely, it can wait until tomorrow, right? Wrong.

Breakouts

Whether you’ve been battling acne for years or you’ve never given a second thought to your skin (we’re not at all jealous), sleeping with your makeup might lead to breakouts. Makeup left on overnight builds up as debris and oil in your pores. Now we’re certainly no Einstein, but even we know clogged pores = spots.

That’s not all. We have even worse news for you. Not only will you be waving goodbye to clear skin, but you could be enlarging your pores in the process. Yep. All those lazy Sunday face masks are doing zilch if you insist on faceplanting your pillow with a full face of foundation every other night.

Skin and the city

If you’ve ever *accidentally* woken up with the remnants of the night before still on your face, you’ll know the tight, agitated feeling your skin gets. Shockingly, our skin doesn’t like it when we suffocate it through the night (who knew?!) and it’s not shy in letting us know its mad.

After all, wouldn’t you be mad if you were left chilling in an entire day’s worth of air pollution? That’s right. Your beautiful makeup is acting as a sponge for everything bad our city air offers. Leave it on and your skin’s poor old defence barrier gets broken down, leaving it vulnerable to severe damage. Alongside acne, think: premature ageing (fine lines, dark spots – the lot).

Dry skin

No amount of moisturising in the morning will erase the night before. Makeup stops the skin’s ability to restore the moisture it lost in the day. Instead, your skin will be left to dry out and suffocate. Whilst a heavy-duty moisturiser might be able to help you out first thing, as you get your grind on, your skin could suffer and start to flake.

Trust your skin

The skin doesn’t get enough credit for the magic it can work. Okay, it may need a little boost for some things, but it knows what it’s doing. Like the rest of our body, the skin tends to pull out its tricks (*good or bad*) while we sleep.

We couldn’t imagine going through life without our lovely little tea and biscuit breaks. So, we need to stop expecting our skin to do the same (okay, minus the biscuits. And the tea.) If our skin doesn’t get a break, it burns out. Without a chance to recover, you can end up developing rashes and all sorts over your face as your skin battles with the effects of air pollution and week-old concealer. Yikes.

If none of these sound appealing, make sure you’re stocked up on make-up remover!