Does Drinking Age Your Face? What Alcohol Does to Your Skin
I get asked this a lot in the treatment room, usually in a whisper. "Does drinking age my face?" The short answer is yes, and you can usually see it before you feel it.
What a drink does to your skin that night
Alcohol pulls water out of you. That is why you wake up thirsty. Your skin is the last organ to get water and the first to lose it, so the morning after, the face looks flat, the fine lines look deeper, and the under-eye area looks hollow. None of that is damage yet. It is dehydration, and it is fixable with water.
The second thing is inflammation. Alcohol opens up the small blood vessels in the face. That is the flush some people get after one glass. For skin dealing with rosacea or redness, that flush can stick around longer each time.
What it does over years
This is the part that ages you. Alcohol is sugar. Sugar in the blood attaches to collagen and makes it stiff and brittle, and stiff collagen is what a sagging jawline is made of. Alcohol also uses up vitamin A, which your skin needs to make new cells, and it keeps you out of deep sleep, which is when the skin repairs itself.
So the face that drinks regularly tends to look puffy in the morning, red across the cheeks and nose, dull by the afternoon, and softer along the jaw than it should be for its age. I can usually tell in the chair.
What I tell my clients
Water first. One glass of water for every drink, and 150 ounces a day regardless. The lymphatic system that clears the puffiness only moves when it is flushed.
Clear is better than sweet. A cocktail is a drink plus a dessert. If you are going to drink, skip the sugar on top.
Never sleep in the night. Cleanse, serum, and a thick layer of balm before bed, even when you are tired. Especially when you are tired.
The next morning is a lymphatic massage morning. Balm on thick, slow strokes down the neck, along the jaw, out from the centre of the face. It moves the puffiness out.
Where Scheál comes in
You cannot undo a glass of wine with a jar. What you can do is give the skin what alcohol takes away: water, oils, and the botanicals that calm redness. That is what The Lift is built for. The Serum and the Balm put the moisture and oils back, the Mask and Exfoliant take the dull layer off, and the Toner helps the skin hold onto water instead of losing it.
If your skin is more red and reactive than dry, Clear Skin is the gentler route, with aloe, chamomile and cucumber doing the calming.
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This is my experience from twenty-eight years in skin, not medical advice. If you are worried about your drinking, please talk to your doctor.