Pillow lines and how to avoid them

One day a few months ago, I was putting my makeup on one morning on holiday when I noticed two huge creases on my forehead. These creases were diagonal, and ran from my hairline down my temple, unlike the other lines littering my forehead, which are all either horizontal or vertical (the “elevens” between the eyes).”Sleep wrinkles!” I thought with relief. “They’re just sleep wrinkles from my pillow, which means they’ll go away in a few minutes, like they always do – thank goodness for that!”

Except, the sleep wrinkles did not go away. Sure, they faded a little over the course of the day, but they didn’t disappear entirely, like the pillow lines of the past. Huh. I figured the hotel’s pillow cases were probably much starchier than the ones I use at home, so I ignored the two diagonal lines (which, after a bit of prodding, I could see were, indeed, the lines the skin on my forehead falls into when it’s pressed against the pillow) until I got home. And they were still there. They weren’t as bad as they’d been on holiday, so I’m guessing the pillow probably did have something to do with it, but as I always sleep on the same side (and can ONLY sleep on that side), they’re only going to get worse. So I did some investigating and came up with the following options:

3 Ways to Prevent Sleep Wrinkles

1. Anti-Wrinkle Pillows

As lying in the same position night after night is what causes sleep lines, it makes sense to try and modify your sleeping position to avoid making them worse (or to stop them before they start, if you’re lucky enough not to have any). Unfortunately for me, this seems to be an impossible task: I’ve been trying my best to sleep on my back, or even on my other side (so I develop a matching set of sleep wrinkles on the other side of my face!), but I just can’t do it.

I’m a creature of habit, and my habit is to sleep on my left side, so even if I start off in some other position, I’ll always end up with the left side of my face crushed into the pillow, developing more lines. These pillows are designed to stop you doing that. You can still lie on your side, but they support your head in such a way as to stop the skin creasing. Sounds fabulous, but unfortunately it doesn’t come cheap: the one shown above is the Grande Pillowette, which is £65, while La Petite will set you back £40. Still, if it works, then I’d consider that pretty cheap, so it could be well worth it. There are various other pillows like this on the market: I suspect I’ll be investing in one of them soon!

2. Silk pillowcases

Sleeping on a creased pillow is a great way to make sure you wake up with those same creases on your face the next morning, so for years now people have been marketing silk pillowcases as beauty aids, on the basis that they’re much less likely to crease your skin. (They’re also kinder to your hair than a normal pillow, too.) One company I’ve written about before is Silkskin although, again, there are plenty of other sources of silk pillowcases out there too.

3. Frownies

Ah, Frownies! The sticky patches which you apply to your lines last thing at night, on the premise that they’ll prevent your skin from creasing during the night, and allow you to wake up looking at least a little less lines that you were the night before! They won’t make the lines go away for good, of course, but they claim to make them less visible, and prevent them getting worse. I’ve decided to make Frownies my first line of defence in the war against my diagonal forehead lines, and I have a brand new bow of them sitting on my desk right now, which I’ll start using this week, and will report back on in due course.

Does Botox work on Pillow Lines?

Apparently not. Botox works on dynamic lines – so, the ones that form due to you repeatedly moving the muscles of the face – and it works by effectively freezing that muscle, and preventing the movement that causes the problem. Sleep wrinkles, however, are caused simply by the skin folding against itself when pressed against a pillow. There are no muscles to freeze in the places my sleep wrinkles appear, for instance, so Botox wouldn’t make any difference to them, in the way it would to the “elevens” between my eyes, for instance.

If you are willing to go down a surgical route, however, it looks like a bit of dermal filler injected under the lines could help smooth their appearance: it won’t, however, prevent the sleep wrinkles from forming again as soon as you you squash your head against that pillow, so this is definitely one of those situations where prevention is better than cure: so, with that said, anyone else got any other suggestions on how to deal with the dreaded pillow lines?