Beauty Sleep: Solid Science
Beauty sleep is no longer an old woman’s superstition but is now a solid fact supported by science. A group of Swedish scientists studied 23 volunteers all of whom were between 18 and 31 years of age and were healthy.
These volunteers were all photographed twice: once after they had had sufficient rest and sleep for eight
hours, and then once when they had been sleep deprived. On the second occasion, they were kept awake for 31 hours after they had slept for only 5 hours.
Nobody wore make-up and all of them were allowed exactly the same grooming, shaving. They were then asked to keep neutral expressions on their faces and look relaxed while they were being photographed.
These photographs were then shown to sixty-five people. These people had not been trained for the exercise and were told to give their subjective opinions about the photographs. All the photos were rated according to factors like attractiveness, healthy appearance and tiredness. The participants were asked to rate the images according to their own perceptions only i.e. there was no right or wrong answer.
This means that if you don’t feel rested and refreshed it is going to show on your face. People are going to make decisions about you, on how healthy or how attractive you look based on how rested you feel. If you have had a good night’s sleep, that was undisturbed, then your body feels fresh and rested. This means you look better, more attractive and healthier.
If you feel more tired then you also look more tired, and as a result people don’t find you as attractive as before. The researchers concluded this is because people are subconsciously sensitive to facial cues that are based on the amount of sleep or rest you have had.
Generally, human judgment involves complex processes, whereby ingrained, often less consciously deliberated responses from perceptual cues are mixed with semantic calculations to affect decision making… Thus, all social interactions, including diagnosis in clinical practice, author of the study, John Axelsson, PhD, wrote, “This study shows that sleep is important for facial features and hence makes up the first scientific evidence of the phenomena of ‘beauty sleep.
