Ah, dark circles. Those odious bags make you look and tired even if you’ve had more than your fair share of beauty sleep.
If you want to send them packing for good, you first need to figure out what’s causing them. Lack of sleep is the most popular culprit but by no means the only one. Genetics, blood leaks, hyperpigmentation and even aging all play a part.
To figure out what’s causing your dark circles, apply a gentle pressure on the area and see what happens:
- Does the shadow disappear? You have blood pooling under your eyes
- Is the color still there? You’re dealing with excess pigment
Use Vitamin K For Dark Circles Caused By Blood Pooling
Vitamin K is the underdog of the vitamin world. It’s not as famous as vitamins C or E but it has a superpower that can keep dark circles away: it plays a vital part in the coagulation process.
It works like this: fragile capillaries leak blood all over your undereye area. The skin is so thin there, the leak is visible to the naked eye. It looks like a brownish stain that makes you look like you haven’t slept in a month.
Vitamin K makes your blood clot. When you apply it to the leaky area, it stops the blood from spreading, reducing the appearance of your dark circles. The best part? It also helps prevent future leaks!
Studies have shown that vitamin K is even more effective when used together with retinol. A study published in Cosmetic Dermatologist has found the combination of vitamin K and retinol to improve dark circles in 93% of patients studied!
Vitamin K is the key ingredient in our Vitamin K Cream. Thanks to its blood clotting abilities, it’s also effective to minimise bruises, spider veins and any purplish blotches. For best results, layer it over a retinol serum.
Use Retinol and Bearberry For Dark Circles Caused By Hyperpigmentation
You’ve probably heard you shouldn’t use retinol on the undereye area. That’s true… to an extent. High concentrations of retinol may indeed irritate this delicate area, but a lower dose or a microencapsulated delivery system, like the one we use for our Night Renewal Cream, will be a lot gentler and keep both dark circles and crow’s feet at bay.
Retinol’s superpower is its ability to speed up cellular turnover, the skin’s exfoliating process. As the darker cells on the surface of your skin slough off, the newer, more even-toned cells come up, slowly brightening your undereye area.
Bearberry is a natural skin lightener, derived from the same plant used to make chemical lighteners, such as Arbutin and Hydroquinone, but Bearberry is the pure extract from the plant, and does not contain the undesirables that sometimes come with the chemical versions. As for dark circles treatment, Bearberry comes in where retinol leaves off. It suppresses future pigment from building up again. Our Bearberry Extract is a pure concentrate version that you can easily mix with the Night Renewal cream. On top of it, retinol and bearberry both fight free radicals and boost collagen, treating the wrinkles you already have and preventing new ones from forming. Talk about killing two birds with one treatment!
The only other thing to mention is, with retinol you may want to start small. Twice a week is more than enough to give you all the benefits without any dryness and flakiness. Once your skin has gotten used to it, you can up frequency. 
When all else fails, try concealer
What if you’ve tried everything and nothing works? Sometimes, genetics are to blame for dark circles and it's just more than what is capable to treat with topicals. Other times, that dark shadow is due to aging. As you get older, the area around your eyes become hollow, casting a shadow on your face that makes you look tired all the time.
While you should still use an eye cream with retinol and caffeine to fight crows’ feet, the only way to make those dark circles disappear is concealer. Opt for a peachy shade that’s one or two tones lighter than your natural skin tone. The peachy colour counteracts the bluish or purplish undertones of your dark circles and brightens the eye area. You’ll look like you’ve had eight hours of rest even if you’ve barely slept a wink!
Gone are the days when skincare was powerless against dark circles. Now we finally have the treatments to fake our beauty sleep and look rested every day.