A few cheap tricks to help out any sleepy student
By Brittney MacDonald, Staff Writer
As I watch both new and veteran students file in for the crowded fall semester, it seems the early mornings have taken their toll on many unsuspecting faces. Gone are the summer days of lounging in bed till noon, but that doesn’t mean you have to look like it. Dark circles are a pain in the butt, especially if they’re genetic like mine, but there are a few easy tricks you can use to help banish them from your life.
Many beauty brands are now producing roller balls with formulas that promise to de-puff and conceal discolouration. Unfortunately, many of these can be expensive—or worse, give you premature wrinkles as they dehydrate the skin and remove collagen. So to save my face, not to mention my wallet, I scoured YouTube for do-it-yourself tricks that worked.
Of course the easiest way is to just get more sleep, but seeing as some people don’t adjust to a new schedule as well as others, that just might be off the table for a little while.
One of the simplest tricks is to freeze two spoons. In the morning all you have to do is just place them under your eye to remove swelling. Unfortunately this does very little to help the bruised colouring. So following beauty guru Michelle Phan’s advice, I soaked two cotton pads in green tea before freezing them. The chill still relieves the swelling of a puffy eye, but the added green tea also promotes blood flow, helping get rid of that stubborn dark colour.
For people who have dark circles run in their family it can be a little more difficult to relieve them. The best solution I have found is Vitamin K. Vitamin K promotes circulation, which will not only help with your dark circles but with your bruises as well. Unfortunately eye creams containing an adequate amount of Vitamin K tend to be really expensive; I’m talking in the couple hundred dollars range. That is certainly outside of the budget for most college and university students I know.
So for anyone who’s as frugal as me there’s a simple solution: go right to the source! Any health food store or GNC Nutrition can provide Vitamin K either through stock or customer order. The easiest to work with is the gel caps, but the regular capsules can be broken down just as easily. If using the gel caps, all you have to do is prick them with a pin and apply the liquid contents below your eyes before bed and wash it off in the morning.
If you choose the regular capsules, just crack open the pill and mix the vitamin powder into a small amount of baby oil. Using baby oil will avoid any irritation to your eyes, but still I would recommend avoiding getting it too close to your water line. You might look a little frightening until morning, since the capsule’s contents can vary in colour depending on the brand you buy; but after a few days, you’ll notice those dark circles begin to fade. After that, all you have to do is apply the Vitamin K once in a while to make sure there’s no second-coming and you’re good to go.
Now for my favourite solution! As pretty much all of these tricks have shown, the best way to get rid of dark circles is to promote blood flow. And one of the most enjoyable ways to help promote blood flow is drinking red wine. So if you can bear the switch from mojitos, and down a bottle or two with your friends in the name of beauty, it will be a worthwhile sacrifice.
Hopefully one of these tricks will help you in your quest to look less like a morning zombie, at least until you get that new sleep schedule under control.
