How to prevent crows-feet (and stay young looking)

Many people take daily action to prevent or reduce wrinkles, using moisturiser, making lifestyle changes and even resorting to surgery. At least one type of wrinkle, however, might be more numerous and deeper because of your eyesight, and even very slight imperfections can cause it.

Few people want crows feet (those angled wrinkles radiating out from the outer edge of the eye), even fewer know that their optician can help them stay young looking.

Let’s start with the obvious: good glasses help you see, so by the end of the day, your eyes (and you) don’t look so tired. Actually, you won’t feel so tired either.
What if you’ve never had glasses and don’t need glasses?

The very first camera was a pinhole camera. It works because everything’s in focus when viewed through a small aperture. The pinhole camera didn’t need a lens or focus ring, if the pinhole is small enough, everything’s sharp.

The same principle applies to us. We can focus more easily in bright light because our pupil becomes more like a pinhole.

If you can see clearly and everything’s in focus, your body is doing all sorts of things to make that happen: the muscles around your lens are pulling it into shape, your pupil is adjusting to the light level .. and, your eyelids may be squinting, because squinting makes your eyes smaller, and a smaller aperture helps to get things into focus.

Your small prescription, the slight thing wrong with your eyes that your body is compensating for .. it’s there all the time. All day, every day. And over time, your body adapts to the new normal. It becomes how you look. And the lines in your face when you squint .. those become permanent creases, crows feet. Great in their place (on a crow), not so great for us.

So part of your anti-wrinkle regime should be to have regular eye examinations and keep up to date with your glasses and contact lenses. When was the last time you had an eye test?

What was that about eye colour? Simply, blue eyed people are more prone to developing crows feet. Watch this space and we’ll explain more another time.