As many of us embrace the festive season by visiting Winter Wonderland, celebrating at work Christmas parties or hosting a dinner party with our loved ones, it’s easy to forget the damaging effects that drinking alcoholic beverages can have on our skin. Research from Boomerang has previously recorded that on average Brit’s consume 26 units per day at Christmas. This compiles to a projected six billion units of alcohol consumed between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. Despite the enjoyment of sharing a mulled wine with your friends, it is important to bear in mind how having one-too-many can have detrimental on your health, and your skin.

Alongside the pulsating headache and nausea, you may find yourself breaking out with red blotchiness, dark circles around your eyes, and general itchiness and irritation. Skincare experts explain this, as alcohol consumption causes inflammation to bodily tissue and dilates our blood capillaries resulting in redness. Further, alcohol is known to expand our pores which give way to the appearance of blackheads as well as whiteheads. Although we acknowledge we enjoy more drink over Christmas, alcohol is not the only enemy that contributes to ill-looking skin.

Uvence – a naturally based cosmetic treatment that utilises one’s own cells for skin rejuvenation – commissioned nationally representative research which found that 22% of Brits feel that the winter months cause them to look five years older, and a further 45% believing that their skin is less able to recover from the winter damage. With dramatic temperature drops meaning more time spent in doors causes our skin to lose its moisture. While high winds and low temperatures can also cause the skin to become dry and sometimes irritated.

Therefore, it is important that we as a nation consider the culminating effects of the colder, boozier season and how we can prevent long-term damage to our appearance.

Dr Olivier Amar, leading cosmetic surgeon and CMO of Uvence, discusses the impact of alcohol on the skin, and how we can make the most of the festive season without jeopardising our skin:

“All of us are guilty of having one-too-many red wines as we head into Christmas, especially considering this is our first Christmas out of lockdown, it is easy to get carried away. Nonetheless, it is important that we stay mindful of our health during this period, and most obviously, our skin.

The most obvious impact of alcohol is dehydration. You may find that after a night of heavy drinking your face appears puffier and more swollen, this is because when our body is devoid of water our vital organs attempt to hold on to whatever water we have left. Therefore, the solution is unsurprisingly, to stay hydrated wherever possible.

Furthermore, although you may find it easier to fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow, your sleep is disturbed when you have been drinking. Sleep is a vital component in ensuring our complexion stays healthy-looking and fresh, which is why experts recommend between seven to nine hours sleep per night to prevent our skin from premature ageing and to maintain the healing factors embedded in our epidermis. However, even when these natural, more obvious, remedies fail to mask the skin’s hangover, people are keen to seek out subtle ways to combat the negative effects of external sources such as the winter months, and alcohol consumption.

Now, patients often look for naturally based answers to their skin concerns. Uvence is one example of a regenerative treatment, which cryogenically preserves purified extracts of a patient’s own fat tissue for reinjection in the form of a ‘biofiller’. In other words, although our bodies are naturally equipped with the resources needed to slow the ageing process, it doesn’t always have enough of them to be effective. Taking fat cells from other areas of the body, such as the stomach, and redistributing them to areas that are in need of rejuvenation therefore maximises the body’s natural ability to slow ageing.”