How does sleeping reduce the appearance of eye bags?
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Your eyes and the area around them are pretty delicate and are filled with a lot of really small blood vessels that tend to break quite easily when you’re tired or stressed out, so they leak blood into the skin around your eyes, which gives them the dark “bruised” look.
When you go to sleep, your body uses way less energy than it normally does when you’re up and about. Since your muscles are resting and your eyes are closed and everything’s nice and relaxed, your body takes the time to get out its fixing toolbox and do repairs. Since you effectively don’t use or need your eyes while you’re asleep, your body will patch up the broken blood vessels around them, and the leaked blood gets broken down and cleaned up.
Edit: some people have noted there are other factors for your eyes being dark, like your natural pigmentation (some people do just have a darkness around the eyes). There are quite a few reasons beyond just broken blood vessels as for why they’re dark (like the blood vessels getting inflamed and showing up more) but broken blood vessels are what I decided to focus on as the OP specified why *sleeping* seems to rectify that, in which case this is because of the aforementioned repair mechanisms (which also deal with things like inflammation). You’ll note it usually takes a few days of good sleep for bags under the eyes to clear up and they do colour-shift slightly, but only slightly, as there’s not that much blood there.
Additionally, when you’re tired, your heart doesn’t function as well as it should, which can lead to blood draining from the face, which makes any natural pigmentation there more obvious.
As for why I didn’t include this in the original response, I felt it was outside the scope of the original question, but I’m adding this edit in for those who feel it may be too reductive. If you want accurate, sourced answers for things, it’s generally better to go to r/askscience.
I don’t think science has an exact answer yet.
However, I was reminded of [this short SciShow video](https://youtu.be/XDaY4AzsL_8) talking about how it’s related to touching your face when you’re tired.
The implication of the video in relation to this post is that sleeping reduces the appearance of bags indirectly by causing you to touch your face less because you feel less tired.
Is get around 8 hours of sleep a night and I still have massive bags under my eyes pretty much permanently. Am I sleeping wrong?
so are eye bags essentially bruises?
I can cope with about 5 hours of sleep per night but if I don’t want dark circles around my eyes, I need about 11.
In this comment section, I learned that I will need lots more sleep to *ever* hope to repair my raccoon eyes.
Your lower eyelids (really, eyelids in general) are very delicate pieces of skin. They’re filled with a lot of tiny blood vessels that can break from strain.
This is literally a bruise; damaged capillaries (tiny blood vessels) that bleed under the skin. So you’ve worked your eyelids so much that they started to bleed. ~~absolutely metal~~
So, since your baggy eyes are a form of damage, they need to be fixed. Your body tends to do most of its fixing when you’re asleep, because it can’t fix things well when they’re are moving
So when you sleep, your body goes “looks like it’s time to get to work”, and they start to fix those eyes. Fix the blood vessels, and clean up the pooled blood.
I sleep like 8 hours a night yet I’ve had them almost all my adult life. I don’t really know what to do
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