How Your Skin Repairs Itself As You Sleep

Our skin is our immune system’s first line of defense—its strength is essential to our well-being. All day, our skin protects our insides, acting as a natural armor against daily stress from pollution, climate, and the environment. These stressors can cause visible irritation, from redness to dryness. At night, our skin switches to repair mode, and this is where the idea of beauty sleep comes in.

The closer you get to the ideal sleeping range of 7-9 hours, the better the opportunity for your skin to have the most visible recovery. As you sleep, skin rebuilds its collagen, which helps visibly plump skin, reducing the look of fine lines and wrinkles. Skin regeneration peaks at nighttime, which occurs because your body produces more melatonin—yes, the same kind you can take to help fall asleep. Without enough sleep, you will produce more of the stress hormone known as cortisol, which makes your skin prone to inflammation. If you’ve ever woken up with puffiness around the eyes, that is a perfect example of inflammation from lack of sleep. Studies have even shown that getting more sleep can help heal wounds faster. Ultimately, getting some shut eye will make you feel better, but it can help you look your best, too.

Whether or not you’re always able to get in that ideal 7-9 hours of sleep, we formulated our newest overnight treatment, Indigo Overnight Repair, to help accelerate skin’s natural recovery process. This cushiony serum in moisturizer is formulated to treat and nourish your complexion as the final step in your evening ritual, cocooning skin in gently effective, nourishing botanicals to reveal calmer, stronger skin by morning.

What is most exciting about this formula is how you can see a difference in your skin after just one night. In a 4-week clinical study of 41 participants, 93% of panelists showed improvement in skin radiance and 88% showed improvement in skin softness and suppleness after one night using Indigo Overnight Repair. Japanese indigo extract and red sage root visibly calm irritation caused by pollution and environmental stress, from redness to dry patches. Irritation like this is usually due to a depleted skin barrier, so we formulated this treatment with ceramides, which replenish lipids to retain hydration in the skin barrier. You can see this through a diminished look of dry, fine lines and wrinkles, and in our 4-week clinical study of 41 participants, 100% of the panelists demonstrated a reduction in fine lines and wrinkles after 4 weeks.

We also included mondo grass root to balance the microbiome, which is an invisible ecosystem that lives on the skin. Home to billions of friendly living microorganisms, this layer of skin communicates with our immune system, protects us against infection, tempers inflammation, and protects against environmental aggressors. When unbalanced, the microbiome may function less effectively, and can lead to conditions like psoriasis, allergies, eczema, contact dermatitis, acne, poor wound healing, skin ulcers, rosacea, and accelerated skin aging. A balanced microbiome is important because its innate immune defenses can actively prevent bad bacteria from proliferating while allowing good microbes to flourish, which helps skin perform at an optimal level, revealing radiant, healthy-looking skin.