De-Puffing Without Sonya Dakar

The morning after a bottle of wine, a late night, a flight, or dinner at a sushi restaurant (so basically every single morning of our lives), our eyes and face are as puffy as the marshmallow man. Instead of resigning ourselves to an eternity of puffiness (at least we will be safe if we're in a car accident, and the airbag fails to go off…?), we have found some cheap methods to de-puff. Needless to say, the $200 eye cream was not in our budget.

Everyone has probably heard the old ice-water-on-the-face trick. The most effective way to do this is to soak a washcloth in a glass or bowl of ice water and then cover your face with it for a few minutes. However, you might not have heard that sucking on an ice cube or a popsicle will help speed up the process, de-puffing you from the inside out.

To zero in on the eyes, beauty experts have moved past simple old cucumber slices. They also advise taking two slices of a refrigerated potato, soaking them in cold chamomile tea, dipping them in aloe vera gel, and then placing the slices over your (closed) eyes for twenty minutes. This treatment will moisturize, soothe, and tighten the skin around your eyes. If all you have is the tea, take two soaked tea bags and chill them in the freezer until they are nice and cold. Then place them on your eyelids. The chamomile will soothe, and the chill will tighten up the puffy skin.

Other cheap methods include sweating it out (either by working out or – our favorite – lounging in a hot sauna), drinking tons of water (which counter-intuitively flushes out the salt, and the extra water with it), eating natural diuretics like watermelon, getting neither too much sleep (who are these people?) nor too little sleep, and cutting back on salt (not going to happen). One of our mothers also swear by sleeping with her head propped up using multiple pillows, which prevents gravity from pulling fluids towards the face at night. She is in her 50s but gets hit on more than girls in their 20s, so her advice is definitely to be trusted.