The secret to better skin? Carry out your beauty regime before bed

Across the land, before they go to bed, millions of men and women apply lotions and potions in an effort to achieve beautiful skin.

Now experts at the No7 beauty and skincare brand, working with researchers at the University of Manchester, have suggested that timing is the secret to achieving optimal results, based on new research into the skin’s natural repair rhythms.

Their study found that the process follows a 24-hour cycle that peaks during a “rush hour” in the dead of night — but over-exposure to the sun can wreak havoc with this natural rhythm.

Skin repair genes are at their peak in the early hours

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The key genes responsible for maintaining healthy skin are activated in a peak between 2am and 4am, suggesting the body is likely to produce a larger amount of skin repair proteins while most people are asleep.

Over-exposure to the sun can reduce the activity of these genes and create a “jet-lag” effect that could hamper the repair process, researchers discovered.

Their findings add to evidence that the health of our skin follows a “circadian-style” rhythm and was the first to show that this cycle can be disrupted and weakened by spending too much time in the sun without adequate protection.

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Beauty industry experts from the No7 brand said the findings reinforce the importance of protecting your skin from the sun. They said it also suggests that people should aim to use their skincare products at the same point in the 24-hour cycle, with night-time before bed potentially an optimal time.

Professor Qing-Jun Meng, a professor of chronobiology, or the study of the body’s natural rhythms, at Manchester, took 160 skin biopsies from 20 individuals from sites that had been exposed to the sun (the forearms) and compared them with samples from the same person from areas that hadn’t (the buttocks).

They measured the activation levels of key genes associated with skin repair at four points over 24 hours and found that, in healthy skin, they were at their highest between 2am and 4am. Meng said these genes would probably go on to produce higher levels of skin-repair proteins over the following hours.

In sun-exposed skin these genes were expressed at lower levels and the timing was shifted forwards by an hour.

Meng said the study was “exciting because, for the first time, the impact of chronic sun exposure on circadian rhythms in global gene expression has been investigated in human skin from the same individuals”.

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The study was conducted with Dr Mike Bell, head of science research at No7. The research was presented to the American Academy of Dermatology’s conference in Orlando last month. It is set to be submitted for peer-review and publication in a dermatology journal, Bell said.

He said it would make sense to perform your skincare regime “at the same time consistently” each day, suggesting “applying it before you go to bed” but said advice would not include “waking up at 2am to apply it”.

The repair rhythms of skin cells can end up “out of sync” with neighbouring cells. Meng and Bell conducted a laboratory study to identify an extract from the roots of Lindera strychnifolia, a southeast Asian shrub, which they said may be able to “re-synchronise” these cycles. No 7 plans to use it in a new skincare product. Bell said he would like to repeat the sun-exposure study using the extract to further test its efficacy.

Dr John O’Neill, an expert in cellular rhythms at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, who was not involved in the research, said it had been “understood for more than a decade that there are circadian rhythms in human skin”, but said it was not clear that higher levels of gene activation always led to larger amounts of skin-repair proteins immediately being produced.

Dr Debra Skene, a chronobiology expert at the University of Surrey, also not involved in the study, said the findings were “very exciting” but said more research was needed to examine whether the cycles were being driven by our internal circadian body-clock or by external factors such as sleep or diet. Asked about the root extract, she said: “In theory indeed there could be molecules that could phase-shift and synchronise a rhythm” but said “a lot of work would still need to be done” to verify it.