So lately I’ve been considering something quick and cosmetic. Something at the derm’s office. Something like Botox or maybe a filler. I’ve never really been for or against them; I thought I’d maybe try them someday. Then my husband mentioned casually one day that he had tried Brotox (a version of the wrinkle relaxer marketed to men). I looked closer at his face. His brow furrow crease was gone, and I was jealous.
Which is why I find myself one day in Grand Central Terminal, catching a train to Norwalk, Connecticut, to see my sister-in-law Deanne Mraz Robinson, M.D., FAAD, of the Connecticut Dermatology Group. (She was also chief resident of dermatology at Yale.) If I’m going for this, I want to be in her hands.
“To help you look more awake, there are a couple of things we can do,” Deanne says as I recline in a comfy chair in her office. “Soften these lines that form on the side of and between your eyes when you smile with a bit of Botox”—which relaxes muscles and smooths out lines—“here, here, and here, and in between the eyebrows.” (Yes, please!) “And blend the lines under them, the tear troughs, with filler.” For me, she picks Belotero Balance, a dermal filler that unfolds wrinkles and plumps the skin.
I’m nervous and excited. I have no fear of needles, but I’m worried about looking, well, weird, in that waxy, plastic, Hollywood-red-carpet way. The injections take 10 minutes, and it’ll be two weeks before the filler all settles in. At first my face does feel odd. When I laugh, my face feels a little stuck, which makes me laugh even harder. But in exactly 14 days, the funny sensations end. The crease between my brows barely remains—same with the wrinkles around my eyes when I smile. People are noticing (“You look amaaazing,” says one colleague), but more important, I feel better. I get why people spend all this money (sessions start at $450) and make it a regular thing. And I have no guilt—I am a feminist and I think modern feminism means you have the choice to age how you like. My joy is completely unapologetic. Who knows? Maybe by the time my first visit wears off, I might actually be getting some real sleep.
Method #4
Actual Sleep—Eight Whole Hours Of It!
Tester #4: Cristina Mueller
“Are you feeling OK? Do you have allergies?” This is Mary, the lovely woman who runs the shop where I take my dry cleaning. I swear, a kinder, more considerate person doesn’t exist in the world, so if she’s commenting on my bloodshot eyes and haggard face, you know the issue is real. The issue on the day in question isn’t allergies; it’s simply a lack of sleep. I’m a chronically tired mother of a three-year-old, and I average six to seven hours a night—sometimes dipping down to five, with an occasional 2:00 A.M. screaming interlude, followed by a half hour spent scrunched into a four-foot-long toddler bed, reassuring the worried party that, no, there is no wolf lurking in the corner. What I’m saying is: Those six hours do not qualify as beauty sleep.
So when the instructions for this assignment came my way—get significantly more sleep for a week or more—it took about 0.5 seconds to agree to it. My goal: a minimum of eight hours every night, and if I got less, I had to integrate a nap the next day, no excuses.
I got to work immediately.
Week one: I loved those damn naps. I realize that’s akin to saying I liked eating the ice cream or I enjoyed breathing the oxygen. I also realize that naps are easy for me because I work from home—not every woman can just, like, curl up under her desk mid afternoon. But seriously: Naps work. A one-hour nap was eerily similar to getting one of those big-night-out facials. I swear you could see the rest in my face for a few hours after. But by week two, when I’d started to pay off my sleep debt, I was dealing with the vexing consequence of naps: I’d been exhausted for so long that I’d forgotten what well-rested people do to go to sleep, and getting my brain to turn off at 10:00 P.M. felt like a Jedi mind trick I couldn’t master. Keeping the naps to an hour helped, as did nighttime aromatherapy. I’d dab H. Gillerman Organics Sleep Remedy essential oil blend on a tissue and take 10 deep breaths: The zoning-out effect was pretty much immediate.
And after a couple of weeks on my rigorous napping schedule, my skin was good: I was bright-eyed (really); my sporadic hormonal breakouts faded away; random little red bits and inflammation calmed down. Mary noticed (“You must be feeling better!”). But, to be honest, I felt kind of invincible—my eyes, my skin, my mood, the whole package. Because you want the ultimate, most effective tip of all time for how to look less tired? Ready for it? Here it is: Be less tired.
