Tips for Black Lines and Bags Under Your Eyes
Learn how to get rid of bags under eyes, starting with the simplest remedies you can try at home, all the way to the Botox or cosmetic surgery. All of us have to deal with the effects of aging, but you can age more gracefully by taking care of your face and skin, following a few tips.
Some might be harder to follow than others, but if getting rid of puffy eyes, black lines, and bags under the eyes, you should find options to help you look younger.
Swollen Face and Bags Under the Eyes
Bags under your eyes come with age, when your skin starts to lose its elasticity, and when the ligaments in the area of your face around your eyes start to weaken. Various effects cause the skin around your eyes to swell throughout the day.
As aging happens and your skin loses its elasticity, as your eyes swell, your skin has to compensate by growing larger. If your skin isn’t elastic enough, you develop bags under your eyes that are visible even when your eyes aren’t swollen. So, many of the conditions that cause bags under the eyes are treated with remedies that limit swelling of your face.
What Causes “Bags under the Eyes”?
Below are some of the conditions that can lead to bags under the eyes. If your family has a history of swollen bags under the eyes, you are genetically more prone to this condition. Remember that those conditions make your swelling worse, while the lack of elasticity in the skin is caused by heredity, and exacerbated with the natural aging process.
- Poor Nutrition
- Sleep Deprivation
- Alcohol Consumption
- Water Retention
Any of these activities or conditions can make your skin’s tendency to swell and become baggy even worse. You’re well aware that allergies can cause redness and swelling around the eyes, while anyone who’s ever had a hangover knows that water retention and alcohol consumption cause similar swelling of the face. Poor nutrition, such as eating too much salt, can also cause swelling to occur.
How to Get Rid of Bags Under Eyes for Men
There are plenty of products to help women attack the bags under their eyes, but what is a man with baggy eyes to do? Thanks to the “feminization” of men’s beauty products, there are plenty things that men can buy in the drugstore to combat bags under the eyes. Gone are the days when a man could wash his hair with soap and splash on a little Old Spice — men now have as many bath products to choose from as women.
Lines of skincare products made especially for men, such as Clinique Skin Care for Men, are really simple beauty products that men can use without filling their medicine cabinet with girly creams and lotions. If you don’t want to use a facial care product, men can use any method that is traditionally used by women for getting rid of bags, including cucumbers on the eyes, a frozen Q-tip rubbed directly on the bag of the eye, or even a spoon placed in the freezer to press against the eye for a few minutes in the morning.
How to Get Rid of Bags Under Eyes Fast
The fastest way to get rid of the dark circles under your eyes requires a little preparation. The night before a big presentation or the morning before a hot date that night, place unused teabags in the freezer. They need a few hours to get cold, but once they’re appropriately cold, you can simply drape the frozen tea bags on your dark circles for about ten minutes. Voila — no more bags.
How to Get Rid of Bags Under Eyes Naturally
The most natural way to combat the problem of dark circles under the eyes is to handle the swelling problem where it starts — in your diet. If you intake too much sodium, or don’t drink enough water, the areas under your eyes are far more likely to swell and turn dark and unattractive. If you eat a lot of salty snacks and foods during the day, consider switching to low sodium alternatives. Instead of eating a bag of chips, cut up an apple or another piece of fruit. Increase your intake of water at the same time as you limit how much salt you eat. You should drink as much water as you can stand, at least 12 glasses a day. Over time, you’ll see a lightening in the dark circles under your eyes, and eventually they won’t exist at all. Simply changing the way you eat and drink is the most natural way to combat bags under the eyes.
It’s harder for someone who is aging to keep the area around their eyes from swelling, than it is to make your aging skin more supple or elastic. Keeping that in mind, let’s discuss ways to slow down or stop swelling of your face.
Applying a cold compress to your eyes 1 to 2 times per day for up to 15 minutes will help you get rid of the swelling under your eyes. This remedy only works for a few hours at a time at first. Over time, though, this limits the amount of daily stretching of your facial skin, which means the development of bags should be limited over time. Buy a cold compress mask, chill the compress, and wear it on your face for 10-15 minutes about two times per day.
The cold compress helps reduce swelling around your eyes. When the skin around your eyes don’t swell as much, this reduces daily damage to that part of the face and naturally limits the size of the bags under your eyes. Again, this is only a temporary remedy, maybe for a few hours, but making this a part of your daily routine does make a difference over time, because your skin is less damaged.
Some people will tell you to use a thinly sliced cucumber slice to cure bags under the eyes, but these tend to be better for black circles under your eyes, instead of eye bags.
Apply Chilled Green Tea Bags
Green tea contains an antioxidant known as Epigallocatechin gallate or EGCG. This catechin works to slow the aging process on your skin. These effects are not the same in black tea (“iced tea”), because EGCG is converted into a type of polyphenol in black tea. Heating converts EGCG to gallocatechin gallate or GCG, so you must use cold or chilled green tea to help your skin.
Use this in much the same way as you would the cold compress. If the compress isn’t working, move on to green tea.
Because allergies are so often a cause of bags under the eyes, if you can identify which allergens trigger your allergies, you can reduce the bags under your eyes by avoiding those substances or conditions. Get an appointment with an allergist, who can learn which materials you are allergic to by taking skin tests. Process of elimination should finally get to the truth of your problem.
Treat Your Face
Treat the bags under your eyes overnight with overnight skin treatments. Try to keep the skin on your face looking as young as possible with exfoliates and other skin care products.
Address Water Retention Issues – Limit Sodium Intake
Since water retention often leads to puffy bags under your eyes, address what causes water retention. One big way to do this is to reduce sodium intake. This is harder to do than it sounds, because so many foods have hidden sodium. Restricting the salt content in your food is a good start, though.
Water Retention – Drink Plenty of Water
Another method is to drink plenty of water. You might think drinking water is going to cause water retention, but you have to look at the underlying reason your skin cells retain water: it’s often a reflexive attempt at conservation. When you drink plenty of water, you body’s cells release the water they store, because they don’t need to conserve water. Drinking plenty of water has the added benefit of flushing impurities out of your skin cells.
Diuretics and Water Retention
Another reason cells retain water is when they take in too many diuretics. A diuretic causes the creation of urine in the kidneys, which naturally purges the body of water content. When you take in too many diuretics, your cells once again retain as much water as possible, causing puffiness and swelling. Alcohol is a diuretic, which is why people who have drank a lot tend to get puffy faces.
Eat a Proper Diet – Water Retention Tips
Eating a proper diet helps stop water retention, because there are a number of nutrients and vitamins you need to help regulate body functions. Avoid foods with monosodium glutamate and hydrolyzed vegetable protein. MSC contains too much sodium, while hydrolyzed vegetable protein contains MSG. Get plenty of B6 protein, which helps to regulate water flow in the body. Unfortunately, it might take up to 6 weeks for vitamin B-6 to help, so be patient and start today. Proper amounts of vitamin B-1 and B-5 also help.
Reduce Stress and Get Plenty of Sleep – Beauty Tips
It’s still not known exactly why getting less sleep causes black circles and bags under your eyes, but we all know this is the case. More than likely, lack of sleep causes the body to work at less than peak efficiency, so our body tends to absorb fewer essential vitamins and retain more water. Also, the body does most of its healing while asleep.
You also know that stress and worry cause bags under the eyes and premature aging. Do everything you can to reduce the stress in your life, which (I know) is easy to say and hard to accomplish.
Smoking causes the blood vessels under your eyes to appear more prominent or bluer. When you quit smoking, this should help reduce black circles and even bags under your eyes.
Don’t Rub Your Eyes
This should go without saying, but rubbing your eyes is going to cause swelling around your eyes, as blood rushes to the area. Keeping your hands out of your eye area only helps to reduce eye swelling.
Botox and Restylane Injections
One of the most effective treatments for the bags under your eyes are injecting cosmetic fillers like Botox, collagen and Restylane. These procedures get rid of the bags under your eyes for up to 6 months to a year at a time. Talk to your doctor and research thoroughly before deciding on this procedure.
Cosmetic Surgery to Get Rid of Bags
The “eye lift” is the most common form of cosmetic surgery to remove bags under the eyes. There are many surgical techniques that can help, though these are expensive and can cause problems, if you rush into the operation. Think long and hard about getting cosmetic surgery, because there is no such thing as “minor surgery”.
Also, choose a good plastic surgeon for your operation, which you should research just as thoroughly as the procedure itself. Ask for referrals. Look at “before and after” photos of former patients. Learn where this plastic surgeon got his degree, learn how long he or she trained, and learn how long the doctor has been performing this procedure (how many similar operations). Whether it’s performing plastic surgery, landing an aircraft or shooting billiards, the more a skill is practiced, the better a person is at that skill.
Tips for Getting Rid of Bags Under the Eyes
Once again, don’t rush into a cosmetic surgery. This should be a last resort, and it should be done by a carefully chosen surgeon. The last thing you want is to have the bags under your eyes become a secondary problem, because of a bad plastic surgery. Usually, knowing how to get rid of bags under the eyes should help you mitigate many of these issues, without resorting to cosmetic injections and surgery.