Two months of sleeping in patches

The last thing I do before bed is small. Two patches under my eyes, one pad torn in half, one half on my forehead and the other under my chin. Two months of sleeping in patches started like that, and it never got more complicated.

Why patches, of all things

I did not choose them because I had finally made peace with retinal. For years I had a list of reasons not to use it: it felt too irritating for every day, it was night only, it meant sunscreen the next morning, and it came with a calendar of which nights I had used it. I wrote about that list in Why I avoided retinoids for years.

The patches and pads were K-SECRET’s SEOUL 1988 retinal eye patches and pads. Disclosure: editor-affiliated brand. I picked them up because they were easy. That is the whole reason. They went on at the end of my routine and came off in the morning, and that was all they asked.

The routine they joined

The patches did not replace anything. They went on top of an evening routine I already had.

First, LANEIGE Cream Skin, which I spray from a mist pump instead of patting it in, so my hands touch my face as little as possible. Then haruharu wonder’s bakuchiol eye cream and a TXA serum. Then the lotion I got from my dermatologist. The patches and the torn pad come last, right before sleep.

Mornings stayed short. I wash with a cleansing gel, mist again, use the same lotion, and finish with innisfree’s hyaluronic sunscreen. That sunscreen matters to this story, because it is one of only two I have found that never make my eyes sting.

The deep cleansing I have done for more than ten years kept going in the background, oil and balm twice a week, and a pharmacy AHA/BHA product once a week.

What sleeping in them is like

The eye patches go on before bed and come off in the morning. I toss and turn, and they stay where I put them. Compared with a full-face sheet mask, they feel far less stuffy.

The pad was the part I improvised. I tear it in two and give one half to my forehead and the other to the skin under my chin, the spot where the bumps live.

What I noticed after about two months

The bumps under my chin are the ones I have had since high school. Most days nobody would see them. They rise when I roll my lips inward or press my tongue against the inside of my chin, and they show through BB cream or foundation.

After about two months, I felt them getting shallower. Not gone, shallower. The spots under my eyes seemed lighter too. I hold that second one loosely, because the freckles and spots there come out every summer and fade every winter on their own, and I cannot separate the patches from the season.

There is a reason a change like this takes weeks rather than nights. In a Geneva study, volunteers who applied retinaldehyde for one to three months developed a thicker outer layer of skin, more so at higher strengths, a sign that renewal in that layer had sped up. Nothing about that happens overnight, and two months of quiet bedtimes was roughly the scale it needed.

My first thought, when I noticed the bumps, was simple: so it was the retinal.

On tired nights

There is one more thing I noticed along the way. After nights of working late, when the skin under my eyes looks hollow and shadowed, retinal and bakuchiol feel like they help. That is a feeling, not a finding, and I keep it in that box.

What I would tell myself two months earlier

The thing that finally worked was the version that asked the least of me. No calendar, no counting nights. Patches and half a pad at bedtime, and then sleep.

If you want the evidence side, on how retinal works on bumpy texture and how long it takes, it is in our companion piece, How does retinal help skin texture?

Related: The bump only I could see, Retinal vs retinol for fine lines and bumpy texture