Sleep Deprived People Are Perceived As Less Attractive

If you think the term ‘Beauty Rest’ is a bit antiquated, think again—the old-fashioned term has just gotten some serious credentials thanks to a new medical study in Sweden.

After studying ten people, researchers at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute found that an adequate night’s sleep helps make a person look more attractive.

Without sleep, participants exhibited drooping eyes and aggravated faces.

Good night's rest: A new study says that people do in fact look uglier when sleep deprived

Each participant was kept awake for 31 hours, and according to the study, their appearance took a noticeable nosedive as a result.

Fourty ‘observers’ compared before and after photos of the study’s ten sleep-deprived participants.

They noticed that the subjects had developed swollen eyelids, bloodshot eyes, and dark under-eye circles after going without sleep for more than a day.

‘We confirmed that sleep deprived people are perceived as more fatigued, less attractive, sadder, and less healthy than when they are rested,’ researchers wrote in their findings, which were published in the medical journal Sleep.

'We confirmed that sleep deprived people are perceived as more fatigued, less attractive, sadder, and less healthy than when they are rested'

They claim that their study’s results confirm ‘the colloquial notion of beauty sleep.’

Study participants also exhibited more facial wrinkles, which research team leader Tina Sundelin attributes to the fact ‘that when you sleep the blood flow to your skin increases dramatically…it thus seemed likely that sleep loss would affect the skin.'

But more than appearance, sleep deprivation also affected the study participants’ moods. Observers felt that they had developed droopy frowns, which was interpreted as a sign of sadness and mental fatigue.

Sundelin says that ‘sleep loss is indeed related to a negative mood…we also seem to be more emotional in general when we don’t get enough sleep.’

It is easiest to observe the effects of sleep deprivation on a human’s face because they ‘contain a lot of information on which humans base their interactions with each other, how fatigued a person appears may affect how others behave towards them,’ Sundelin said in a press release announcing the results of her study.