How to Get Rid of Pillow Marks on Your Face
Those red-pink lines pressed into your cheek at seven in the morning have a proper name — sleep lines, or pillow creases — and the reassuring news is that they're almost always temporary. They appear because your face has spent the night folded against a pillow, and for most of us they smooth out within minutes of standing up. The way to see fewer of them is straightforward: take the pressure and the friction off your skin. Sleep on your back where you can, swap a rough pillowcase for a smoother one, keep your skin well hydrated, and the morning crease becomes a rarer visitor. One honest caveat first — a pillowcase can't iron out a wrinkle, and none of this replaces sunscreen and time. But the friction part is genuinely worth minding.
What a pillow mark actually is
A pillow crease is a temporary wrinkle, formed by the simple mechanics of pressure: your face presses into the pillow, the skin folds, and it holds that fold for a while after you wake. Side and front sleepers get them most — you can often guess which side someone favours from the faint lines on that cheek. For young, well-hydrated skin they vanish in minutes, the skin springing back the moment the pressure lifts. There's nothing alarming about them. They are, more than anything, a record of how you slept.
When a crease lingers
It's worth paying a little attention when they don't fade. As skin ages it loses collagen and elasticity, and a line that once bounced back in seconds may sit for an hour instead — so in a quiet way, how quickly your morning creases disappear is a barometer of your skin's resilience. There's a grain of truth, too, in the old warning not to "make that face or it'll stick": dermatologists note that the same pressure, repeated night after night over years, can help set lines into the skin. Not overnight, and not dramatically — but enough that smoothing the surface you sleep on is a sensible, low-effort hedge.
How to see fewer of them
Back-sleeping is the single biggest lever — it keeps your face off the pillow altogether, which is why it's the position dermatologists tend to recommend. If you're a devoted side-sleeper and won't be reformed, reduce the friction instead: a smoother surface like silk lets skin glide rather than bunch, which is the same reason it's worth asking whether silk pillowcases help with wrinkles and fine lines. Wash your bedding in fragrance-free, dye-free detergent, since fragrances and dyes are common irritants against skin you're pressed to for eight hours. And keep your skin hydrated, inside and out — a glass of water through the day and a good moisturiser before bed both help skin recover its shape faster.
Our LS Silk NZ silk pillowcases are 22-momme, 100% mulberry silk and OEKO-TEX certified — smooth enough that skin slides across them rather than folding in. For the fuller picture of what a night on silk does for your complexion, here's whether silk pillowcases are good for your skin.
Read your morning face kindly. Those fading lines aren't damage so much as a message — about how you slept, how hydrated you are, how your skin is ageing — and once you've smoothed the surface you rest on, you'll mostly stop noticing them at all.