99% of skin care products on the market today are bad products. They either do nothing for the skin or they cause damage. What makes matters worse is that they are marketed in a convincing way by a reputable company, and this causes customers to believe they are doing something healthy when they are actually doing something destructive.

Selling a bad product by making it seem healthy doesn't just exist in skin care, and it didn't begin with skin care either. Cigarette's were once marketed as healthy and recommended by doctors despite the fact that no amount of smoking is safe. Red meat is still promoted as part of a healthy diet by the American Heart Association despite the fact that all red meat, once exposed to heat releases carcinogens. Alkaline water is sold as healthy, despite the fact that the chemicals required to make the water alkaline cause bone brittleness and other health maladies. Not to mention the fact that anything that enters your stomach becomes acidic immediately upon contact, making such a product thoroughly useless to begin with. 

If there was more critical thinking and understanding of biology in skin care, then I believe we wouldn't have 99% of skin care products we have now, because customers wouldn't put up with it. For example, I believe that if more people were aware of how destructive essential oils were in skin care, then no company would be able to get away with putting them in their products. Essential oils create acne, inflammation and skin disease, which begets the need for more skin care products. There is also no reason why fragrance should be in a skin care product other than to make it marketable. That means if your skin care contains fragrance, your health is less important than a sale. 

 

Why Skin Care Cannot Remove Eye Bags

Then there are skin care products as a whole that do not work at all. The biggest offender of which are skin care products that claim to remove under eye bags. 

To understand why it is physically and biologically impossible for skin care to remove eye bags, let me explain what eye bags are and what causes them:

Eye bags are an accumulation of fat and fluid that is found underneath the eye area. Eye bags form as the skin around the eye becomes thinner, the fat cells begin to loosen and settle under the eyes and fluid is less efficiently circulated from the area. 

Eye bags are typically seen with age, and usually start around age 45-50 and grow with increasing prominence with each passing year in some individuals. Some people will have very severe eye bags, and some will not have them at all. The severity of eye bags is causes by a combination of genetics and environmental factors. 

Genetics play a role in the formation of eye bags because your genetics will determine the amount of fat around your eye area, your face shape which plays a role in fat deposition, and your skin thickness. Genetics may also cause some people in their youth to develop eye bags.

Environmental factors such as smoking, diet, exercise and sleep will also influence the prominence of eye bags and the age at which they begin to develop.

Eye bags, although visible on the skin, are actually primarily a quality of your fat and fluid. The loosening of fat cells from the eye area and their settling into a pocket is what gives aged eyes their baggy quality. 

In order to remove eye bags, the fat cells pooled under the eye need to be removed or relocated. Therefore, skin care cannot fix eye bags because skin care cannot go into the body's fat tissue, pick up fat cells and put them into a different spot in the body. This is a biological and physical impossibility. 

Science or Science Fiction?

Any company that claims to have a topical cream or serum or exfoliant that can remove under eye bags is selling you science fiction. And products that claim to remove under eye bags are particularly damaging because they involve a bit of theater to their gimmick: The products contain a high concentration of skin-drying ingredients such as alcohol. When the skin dries from using these products, it gets very tight which causes a temporarily lifting effect from the dryness. This will give the illusion that the eye bags and eye area has become lifted, however once this effect subsides in an hour or two, you are left with the eye bags you began with. However, by drying your skin out, you caused your skin to stretch out, become brittle and damaged. The result over time is a worsening of eye bags, wrinkles and sagging skin. 

Heavily edited images are used to sell non-surgical procedures and topical products marketed to remove under-eye bags. 

If you have under eye bags that bother you, unfortunately the only way to remove them is surgically. Fat cells have to be physically removed to exit the body. Even if you lose weight, fat cells do not leave the body, they just shrink. So dieting won't get rid of eye bags. Massage, dermabrasion, microneedling or any other topical procedure won't get rid of fat cells either, because the body does not have the ability to remove fat tissue. Therefore, by doing such procedures to remove eye bags, it will damage your skin and your bank account and give you no beneficial results. 

What skin care can actually do for your eyes

So what can skin care do for the eyes? In my research I have found that there are 3 things that are effective for the eyes that skin care has shown useful:

1. Brightening the skin around the eyes

2. Improving puffiness caused by fluid retention

3. Prevention of aging skin such as wrinkles, dryness and sagginess

 

The above can be obtained through the correct eye serum, which contains a high concentration of plant extracts and peptides and is used with a proper anti-aging skin care regimen. The Eye Serum I developed from my research and background in anti-aging and cellular biology targets the areas of eye aging that actually can be addressed with skin care. 

 

 

References

Chiang, V. S. C., & Quek, S. Y. (2017). The relationship of red meat with cancer: Effects of thermal processing and related physiological mechanisms. Critical reviews in food science and nutrition, 57(6), 1153-1173.

Jeffery, E., Church, C. D., Holtrup, B., Colman, L., & Rodeheffer, M. S. (2015). Rapid depot-specific activation of adipocyte precursor cells at the onset of obesity. Nature cell biology, 17(4), 376-385.

Kim, H. S., Choi, C. W., Kim, B. R., & Youn, S. W. (2019). Effectiveness of transconjunctival fat removal and resected fat grafting for lower eye bag and tear trough deformity. JAMA facial plastic surgery, 21(2), 118-124.

Wynn, E., Krieg, M. A., Aeschlimann, J. M., & Burckhardt, P. (2009). Alkaline mineral water lowers bone resorption even in calcium sufficiency:: Alkaline mineral water and bone metabolism. Bone, 44(1), 120-124.