Looksmaxxing: why does it all start with sleep?

What is looksmaxxing?

Looksmaxxing is the internet's word for getting the most out of your looks through habits: skin, training, posture, hair, diet and style. The soft version is about routines, the hard version about procedures. Most of what gets shared on TikTok is expensive, time-consuming or poorly supported. The part with the best evidence gets talked about least, because it cannot be sold in a jar: sleeping properly.

Do you really look worse after bad sleep?

Yes, and it has been measured in Sweden. In a study in the BMJ in 2010, John Axelsson and colleagues at Karolinska Institutet photographed 23 people aged 18 to 31 twice: once after normal sleep and once after sleep deprivation. 65 people who did not know which photo was which rated them. After sleep loss, the same faces were rated less healthy, less attractive and more tired.

The same research group followed up in 2017 in Royal Society Open Science. 25 people had restricted sleep for two days and were compared with themselves after normal sleep. 122 raters found them less attractive, less healthy and sleepier, and were less inclined to want to socialise with them. How trustworthy they seemed did not change. A couple of bad nights is enough for it to show.

Does sleep affect your skin?

There are signs that it does, but the evidence is thinner. A study in Clinical and Experimental Dermatology in 2015 compared 60 women: poor sleepers with five hours or less and good sleepers with seven to nine. The good sleepers had lower scores for intrinsic skin ageing, and their skin barrier recovered about 30 percent better 72 hours after a test. They also rated their own appearance as more attractive. Several of the researchers were employed by a cosmetics company, and the study shows an association, not a cause.

Why do you sleep badly when you scroll at night?

Because the light tells your brain it is still day. When 116 people had ordinary room light instead of dim light before bed, their melatonin period was about 90 minutes shorter (Gooley et al. 2011). When twelve people read on a lit screen for four hours before bed, melatonin was 55 percent lower than with a printed book, and it took them ten minutes longer to fall asleep (Chang et al., PNAS 2015). The phone in bed is not just time you are not sleeping, it also moves when your body is ready to.

What does a looksmaxxing evening look like?

• The same time to bed and to wake up, weekends included. It is the foundation everything else builds on.
• No caffeine in the last six hours before bed. More on why in Sleep biohacks that work.
• Dim the ceiling light and the screens two hours before bed.
• Orange lens from sunset, filtering 98 % of blue light.
• Red lens for the last hour if the phone is still out, 99 % between 400–550 nm.
• The phone charges outside the bedroom.

Do the glasses make you better looking?

There is no study on that, and we are not going to pretend there is. What the lens does is filter the evening's blue light, and what we have put work into is making the frame something you actually want to wear on the sofa. LOWLIGHT 04 is made in transparent acetate with gold rivets, LOWLIGHT 05 in a light black frame with a geometric lens. Sleep does the rest of the work.