You Look Tired

As you lie on your deathbed, will a concerned and loving person lean over, wrinkle their brow, and tell you you look a little tired? I’m sure it’s happened more than once in the history of the world.

As well-meaning sentences go, “you look tired” is up there with the most unfortunate. What the person usually means is, “I’m fond of you and I’m doing some caretaking,” but what the recipient most commonly hears is, “you’re not looking so hot”. Looking tired can indicate actual tiredness, or it can indicate nothing. You can be exploding with energy and look tired, or fighting to keep from falling asleep and look bright and well-rested.

You can be any age and look tired. I used to think that “tired” translated directly to “old”, but in retrospect I think it just means “you don’t look as alive as you normally do”. Cold comfort, I know—not to mention splitting hairs.

Because I have been heralded with this comment at least as often as you have, I have developed antidotes. I have so many antidotes that I’m breaking this post into two, lest a single lone scroller be the only one who makes it to the tips at the end.

What looks most “tired” is our eyes, followed by skin. Obviously these two things interact, but this week is mostly about waking up the skin.

For me, there’s nothing as powerful as a yoga class for this purpose: on more than one occasion, famous makeup artists have demanded to know who did my makeup when I in fact had no makeup on save mascara, but had just come from a yoga class. I do think yoga is magic, but any activity—a walk or a run, a cold shower or a hot one, or of course a roll in the hay—does the trick.

I used to think massage just felt good. But the discovery of the fascia—an entire, critical system of waste removal in our bodies that, like dark matter or junk DNA, was considered useless and beside the point until a few years ago—turned me around. I’d always has to admit that people did look better after a facial, and while products are great, and personal energy/being cared for is great, I’m now convinced that massage is the biggest factor.

People love gua sha for face massage/lymphatic drainage at home. I wish I could get with it—I’m sure it works—I don’t know what my problem is. What I can get with is makeup artist Jillian Dempsey’s vibrating gold-bar roller. If I need to look really good for something, I pull it out: it always delivers. Dempsey realized she was using a vibrating roller on every red-carpet client before she started their makeup, and decided to make her own. Hers is gold-plated, with the best tech—incredibly easy to use.

There’s no better argument for the power of massage than a facial with the sublime Anne DeMamiel: you emerge looking astonishingly less tired than when you went in. Her magic is a combination of incredible products, acupuncture, lymphatic drainage, whatever miracle energy it is that DeMamiel herself possesses and treats her clients to (just being in her presence is like sitting in sunshine), and light but powerful massage.