Your Skin Has an Unfinished Basement
“How did you get two black eyes?”
I wasn’t flattered when a substitute teacher asked me this question in high school. The moment we locked eyes the question burst from her and I don’t think she was really thinking about what she was asking. She’d mistaken my chronic dark circles for bruises.
I’ve never been overwhelmingly self-conscious about having undereye bags, even after the comment she made. Do I want to look like I have two black eyes? No, but no matter what I’ve tried they remain the same.
Trending recently in skincare corners of the internet like Tik Tok and YouTube is retinol. After seeing a few videos it seemed to me to be a cure-all for skincare, from anti-aging to dark eye bags. I’m only a skincare amateur. Even if I wasn’t going to buy it I wanted to know how it would work on the skin beneath my eyes or if it could be the miracle I had always needed. From what I’ve learned retinol actually is kind of amazing.
Your skin has three layers, the epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. You could think of these layers as a house with an unfinished basement. The bottom layer of skin, the hypodermis, is the foundation of your house. You need it, you know it’s important, but you can’t really do anything to it. We’re not worried about that today. You probably spend most of your time on the top layer instead, your epidermis. This is your living room bedroom and kitchen. Most of your daily efforts go into taking care of that space. When you wash your face or exfoliate it stays on the top layer of skin, like a good friend hanging out in your living room. The middle layer of the skin, the dermis, is your unfinished basement. What’s down there? Mostly stuff that’s going to make the entire house function and comfortable, like a furnace. My dark circles are a signal that my furnace is broken and it’s affecting the whole house.
Every four weeks your skin cells called keratinocytes located in the epidermis layer replenish. They rise to the top layer of skin and become more compact to protect you from germs. Retinol is your gold standard local handyman. He works in the epidermis and the dermis. As you get older the slower your cell turnover rate is. When this process slows it affects the function of your dermis layer beneath. As a result collagen, the stuff that gives your skin bounce and elasticity won’t replenish as quickly. Without this, your skin becomes wrinkled and frail at the top layer. If your furnace is broken your whole house suffers. You need a handyman like retinol. Retinol changes the cell turnover rate. When this speeds up, a signal is sent into the dermis and collagen production becomes stimulated again. Like the collagen of the past, you have better lifting, elasticity and bounce to your skin again. This is what the sunken valley-like skin around my eyes needs, some youthful inspiration. When you fix the issues below the whole house functions better.
When I was asked about my black eyes I told the teacher, “That’s just my face.”
How true it was. No amount of sleep or water was gonna fix what only retinol could do.