Sleep is essential to our health, wellbeing, productivity, memory, ageing and appearance.
Yet, due to busy and often stressful lifestyles, people are managing to get far less than the recommended eight hours sleep per night.
Enter the category of sleep beauty, which is providing natural sleep solutions and products designed to work with the skin's circadian rhythms.
It's not just the body that feels rested after a good night's sleep. Skin condition is also improved, appearing healthy and more glowing. This is because the division and regeneration of skin cells occurs when we fall into REM sleep.
With this knowledge, cosmetic scientists are focusing on how to create sleep formulations that work on repairing skin cells overnight, even during restless and broken sleep.
The idea of using fragrance as an aid to relaxation is not new and is at the heart of aromatherapy, with chamomile, lavender and sandalwood all well known for their calming powers
Skin rhythm
The skin's circadian rhythms create waves of activity that trigger cells to perform important processes at specific times of the day. During the day the skin is in defence mode and in repair mode at night.
"It's a matter of supplying the right ingredients and the synergy of the ingredients together to make sure that we're giving the best possible results," maintains Dr Michael Pugliese, CEO of Circadia Nighttime Recovery.
He explains that cell turnover occurs at a