A Wren Says

You’ve heard people say, “You look stressed.” Perhaps, you’ve thought of the look of someone disheveled with a furrowed brow. That’s short term. Have you thought about the ways that stress really impacts your appearance from the inside out?

Stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Short doses of it, like exercise or the feeling before public speaking, aren’t the enemy. It’s the long-term experience of stress that has the real impact. During their talk at SXSW 2025, Dr. Emilie Fowler and Rachelle Seguin of OMY Laboratories broke down the way that stress takes a toll on your skin through your hormones.

When you’re stressed, your body releases hormones to prepare your body to respond. In the short term, cortisol acts as an anti-inflammatory. It decreases redness, swelling and pain. That’s great if your stressor is quickly dealt with. But over longer terms, think as low as a week or two, that shifts. You will notice it starts to suppress your immune system. Your skin will start to thin. There will be some atrophy of cells.

This can make your acne and skin aging worse.

With a suppressed immune system, your system can’t fight off the additional bacterial growth on your skin that can cause more acne. Your sebaceous glands will also be upping production of oil. And when your acne erupts, it will take longer to heal and is more likely to scar.

On top of that, stressors will also affect your skin’s ability to produce collagen and elastin. As that decreases, you will notice more wrinkles and overall more signs of skin aging. And as your skin loses elasticity, you might also notice larger pores.

It is easy to think about what products you might need to solve your skincare woes. Unfortunately, it is much deeper than that. Finding healthy ways to deal with your stress just might be key to improving your skin.

Have you noticed stress affecting your skin? How do you deal with stress?