The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: No.1 Eye Doctor Reveals The Truth About Dark Circles, Diet and Blue Light!
28 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What causes dark circles and under-eye bags?
I want to talk to you about bags under my eyes, a subject that I know a lot of people are interested in. And there's a lot of misconceptions around how we get bags under our eyes. I think most people think bags under their eyes are because they're tired or something. And is there a difference between having bags under my eyes and having sort of dark circles under my eyes?
So when it comes to having dark circles under eye bags, dark circles is something that people are definitely concerned about. It's a huge topic online. I see all the time. People ask about it in the eye clinic. Having dark circles under the eyes is technically different than having under eye bags. But if you have under eye bags, it'll make the appearance of dark circles worse.
Okay. Okay.
So dark circles in the clinic, we think first, what's somebody's skin pigmentation like? Is the dark circle just because they have more pigmentation? And if you're somebody who spends a lot of time in the sunlight, you are more likely to develop darker skin complexion around the eyelids. The eyelids are some of the thinnest, most delicate tissue of skin on your body.
And in fact, a lot of people who don't know this, but having skin cancer on your lower eyelids is actually pretty high. So it's good to be wearing either a wide-brim hat or sunglasses to protect the eyes from sunlight damage. The other kind of components is that if you have vascular changes. So myself, I have a really pale complexion.
If I have bad allergies, that can cause the blood vessels around my eyelids to dilate. And so you'll see that color of just the blood vessels coming through the skin a lot easier. And then there's orbital shadow effects. Because some people's orbits, they have more prominent brow. It may kind of cast a shadow onto the lower eyelid.
And that's where having under eye bags can also make the eyelids seem like they have kind of dark circles, because the eyelids are puffy. And you can have puffiness of the eyelids for multiple reasons. Allergies are a big one. salt content of the cheer film, and even in your body can make some of those changes.
I know for myself, if I have a cheat day and I eat a bunch of greasy, delicious pizza, the next morning I'll probably feel, I can feel that my skin and my face is maybe a little bit more puffy.
Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 2: How do diet and hydration affect under-eye appearance?
Okay. I've tried to research this to find any real publications to see if it's really there. And I couldn't find anything. But I know from just my own anecdotal experience that if I eat a really high salt diet, and I've done over the last eight years, I've really done a better job. I know you have too of like thinking about my diet, how that affects me, how my body feels after I eat something.
And so I've noticed if I have a cheat day, that sort of thing can happen.
And where does this, what's the sort of physiological rationale for salt playing a role?
So your tear film, for example, your tear, like I know some people will say, hey, if I have a, watch a sad movie and I cry at nighttime, the next morning my eyes are super puffy. So your tears have salt in them. And because if you ever cried and tasted your tears, they taste salty, right? So the challenge is that when you have salt, it'll draw fluid into the tissues.
And so if people cry the night before, the salt remaining in the tears basically get into the tear ducts and sit on the surface of the eye and the eyelids, and then that can draw fluid into those tissues. Does hydration play a role in that? That's also something that's been looked at in research. It's not really conclusive.
I think hydration is still something we need to ā I do encourage people to at least be aware of their hydration. for dry eye, there is some research that indicates that people who drink more water tend to have less severe symptoms of dry eye.
When I see someone with bags under their eyes, I used to think, well, I still kind of do think that it just means that they haven't slept.
That, again, I recently did a live stream where I did research first and tried to look into this. And they have looked at quality of sleep, time of sleep, and both the subjective and objective appearance of dark circles under the eyes. And they find that it is if you have not been getting good sleep, objectively your under-eye dark circles do not change.
Really?
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Chapter 3: What role do allergies play in under-eye puffiness?
And the cucumber and the cold compress and all that kind of stuff, does that stuff work in changing the appearance of dark circles and bags and demise? Because when I filmed Dragon's Den, a TV show in the UK, it's weird because sometimes when I'm underslept, I come into the studio and the makeup artist, she won't say anything to me, but she'll just put the cucumber on.
And I know what she's saying. She's saying, you look like shit, but she doesn't say it. And it's always when I haven't slept. So I put two and two together and thought, okay, well, she knows that... My eyes don't look great today. But is it actually doing anything, the cucumber?
The coolness effect, I believe, is going to be causing constriction of blood vessels. It's going to be helping the tissue come down and swelling. Just like if you bend your knee or elbow really hard on something, it swells. There's a little bit of inflammation. And so putting cold on there can help momentarily, but I wouldn't do it longer than 15 minutes.
The reason why is because if you do it longer than 15 minutes, your blood vessels can go the opposite way and cause more inflammation. Weird, yeah. There's other things like eye creams. There's a plethora of different eye creams on the market. Some of those do work to help constriction. Some of those are to help truly remove pigmentation.
And a lot of those products can have effect, but it takes months to truly remove the pigment. So you're talking, you're using that two, three times a day for like 14, 15 weeks.
But outside of that, if somebody's tried all those other avenues, talked with their dermatologist or an eye care provider of any kind and things still aren't getting better, there are some surgical procedures that can be done to help people with the appearance of under eye bags and some dark circles.
What do those surgeries do?
They either use various forms of light or light therapies to help remove pigmentation. You have to be careful around the eyes when it comes to those sort of therapies, but they do exist. And then there's fillers, like they'll do hyaluronic acid fillers to change the shadowing effects around the eye. And then there's forms of what are called a blepharoplasty, which are true eyelid surgeries.
And for that, you would want to see an ophthalmologist who specializes in those type of therapies or those type of surgeries.
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Chapter 4: How does sleep impact the appearance of dark circles?
We sat in front of it one day and said, what does this do in terms of our health? And are we allowed to stare at it?
The devices that you got, do they come with goggles? No. Okay. So that is sort of the concern I have is, again, what energy is really not just what wavelengths of light is it emitting, but what's the energy and also how far away from the device are you sitting? What's the recommendations? And specifically with the eye,
There is evidence that red light therapy can help with dry eyes, that red light therapy can help with macular degeneration.
Which is?
So age-related macular degeneration is one of the leading causes of blindness for older age adults. 50 plus. 50 plus. In fact, if you're over the age of 40 and somebody's legally blind, 50% of them it's due to macular degeneration. Mm-hmm. And so probably some of the best research on red light in the eyes is on macular degeneration. In fact, it's currently approved and being used in Europe.
It's not approved in the U.S. just yet, but it is going through FDA trials. But that is a form of red light therapy. It doesn't just use red light. It uses some near-infrared light and a little bit of kind of a yellow light. But they shine that in the eye in intervals and they do it for a few weeks and then a few months you do it again.
And for macular degeneration, they've been able to show that not only can the protein that builds up in the back of the eye in that condition diminish, but they can slow down and slow down the progression of macular degeneration. And for some people, even restore eyesight. They can actually help people see better. Using red light therapy. Using that form of red light therapy.
What about gazing at the sun? Because I've been told so many things. When I was younger, it was like, never look at the sun. And then I got older and people were like, no, stare at the sun. And now I don't know what's true. Yeah, don't stare at the sun. Even for like a second?
Don't. So the challenge is... sunlight is good for the eyes, especially early on in the day and, of course, toward the end of the day, just so that you're getting the signals to your brain to, hey, the sun is coming up, the sun is going down, a way to kind of influence your melatonin production. The staring directly into the sun, though,
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Chapter 5: What natural remedies can reduce under-eye bags?
And in just a few seconds, you can overwhelm that tissue, causing chemical damage to the retina.
Because people, this phrase sun gazing, is this like a spiritual thing? I think I was in Bali and people were like, no, you can, you can sun gaze. You should sun gaze because it's good for you. Sun gazing, what is this term?
That is usually in some sort of either religious or spiritual practice, people will gaze toward the sun. Usually, from my understanding, it's people doing it in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is largely going down the horizon. And because the light is indirectly being bent, perhaps it's not giving as much energy to cause thermochemical damage to the back of the eye.
But there is still a high risk. And so it's always best to not stare directly into the sun or try to look off-center from it. And especially during the high UV times of the day, you know, 10 to 4 p.m. usually, it's good to be wearing UV light protection. Not just because UV can penetrate into the eye, but because UV light damages the skin of the eyelid.
It can cause changes to the front surface of the eye. You can get sunburn on the surface of the eye.
Okay, that's good to know. I'm not going to look at the sun. I was being torn because I've got a friend who told me that sun gazing is good for you and you should do it and stuff, but I'll take your word for it. You mentioned blue light a second ago, which is the light that comes off our devices. Is that harmful for my eyes?
There's blue light that comes from the sun, really high energy. That could potentially cause aging changes inside the eye. The blue light that comes from your digital screens does not have enough power and has consistently shown in research to not increase the risk of aging eye diseases.
It just impacts my sleep potentially.
Impacts your sleep. There's also some claims that blue light can affect your eye strain. But again, research on blue light glasses, on using devices, shows that blue light does not impact eye strain. A lot of people will claim that they will. I have a lot of patients who come in and anecdotally are like, oh, my eyes feel so much better from getting the blue light glasses.
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Chapter 6: Are there effective treatments for dark circles and bags?
They watched over nine years tracking their diet, tracking their eye health and how things were changing. And they find that just eating a Mediterranean diet Green leafy vegetables, oily fish reduces your risk of developing conditions like macular degeneration, specifically slowing down the progression of that condition.
In that specific study, this publication that just came out, they showed that just having 2.7 servings of green leafy vegetables in a week, not a day, but just even a week, right? We're supposed to have more than that in a day, but just 2.7 servings or more can slow down your risk of progression of that condition, macular degeneration, by 25% from going from early to more of an advanced stage.
And macular degeneration leads to blindness? It can, yeah.
especially as we get older. Because that condition, and we can go into it, but that condition has a lot to do with your inflammation. It has to do with metabolism and oxidative stress that occur within the eye. But green leafy vegetables, at least 2.7 servings a week, that's that specific study. They find that oily fish, eating two servings of oily fish a week, slowed it down by 21%.
And then they found a synergistic effect for people who ate both. It was a 41% reduced risk of progressing in that disease. So, and that's not just the only study. They find that people who eat diets that have more fruits and vegetables, that have oily fish, reduce risk of developing conditions like macrogeneration, reduce risk of things like diabetic retinopathy.
And so I try to focus on eating a good, healthy diet.
I mean, the thing that I heard growing up was that you need to eat lots of carrots and then carrots will help your vision. So carrots ā do you know where that came from?
No. It's actually a ā it was propaganda started in the UK by Great Britain. From what I understand, I'm sure there's like a historian out there who's just like grumbling at me. But from what I have read and studied is that ā I believe it was World War II.
that Britain was being attacked by the Germans and they were worried about German warplanes dropping bombs on them, especially at nighttime. And they had already established radar to detect warplanes coming, but they didn't want Germany to know that. So they put out their own propaganda saying, hey, our scouts can detect German warplanes better because they eat their carrots.
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