Tired girl makeup asks women to paint on the evidence of a bad night’s sleep. Most of them are already living it though, science finds.
“Moody and perfect for fall, this look is all about dark smoky lids and smudged eyeliner, sculpted cheeks, natural skin, and emphasized dark under-eye circles,” Drita Paljevic, head makeup artist at Kevyn Aucoin Beauty, told PureWow, describing the tired girl makeup trend that spread across TikTok through 2025 behind Jenna Ortega and Lily-Rose Depp. By October, “keep your lower bleph” was circulating on the same platform as a refusal of the surgery that removes undereye bags. “The new beauty ideal is about wearing signs of life, not erasing them,” cultural strategist Emily Carmeli told Marie Claire.
Underneath the aesthetic sits a measurable condition: Only 27 percent of American women between 18 and 49 say they get the sleep they need, against 46 percent of men the same age, according to Gallup polling. Fifty-seven percent of Americans overall say they would feel better with more sleep and 42 percent say they get enough, close to a reversal of the 2013 figures, when 56 percent got what they needed. Average nightly sleep now sits at a historically low 6.5 hours. Sixty-nine percent of women 18 to 49 report frequently experiencing stress, against 55 percent of young men.
Why women sleep worse than men
In 2024, 30.4 percent of women and 30.6 percent of men averaged under seven hours of sleep, essentially identical. The gap appears in difficulty rather than duration. Women reported trouble falling asleep most days or every day at 18.5 percent against 12.2 percent of men, and trouble staying asleep at 21.4 percent against 14.6 percent. A 2024 review put women’s odds of insomnia at 1.58 times men’s.
“Women don’t typically report sleepiness…Rather, they’re more affected by tiredness, characterized by lacking energy,” Dr. Audrey Wells, a board-certified sleep medicine physician, told the Sleep Foundation. She also described what keeps women awake. “Invisible burdens can weigh on a woman’s mind and interrupt sleep because they generate emotions that are incompatible with sleep,” she said.
Several of the medical contributors are common, cheap to test for, and frequently missed. Iron deficiency affects 39 percent of American females between 12 and 21, against iron-deficiency anemia at 6 percent, in a study of 3,490 young women published in JAMA in 2023. The gap between those two figures is the problem, because a standard hemoglobin test clears the great majority of deficient patients. “Why are we not screening for a condition that is highly prevalent, easily diagnosed, easily treated and associated with serious symptoms and increased risk of death if not addressed?” asked Dr. Angela Weyand, the study’s lead author, noting that current testing recommendations focus on toddlers and on people who are pregnant or already showing symptoms of anemia. Long COVID has been reported by 8.5 percent of women against 5.2 percent of men, and myalgic encephalomyelitis by 1.7 percent against 0.9 percent.
Workload accounts for a substantial share of the rest. Sixty-one percent of women reported frequent burnout against 42 percent of men in Women in the Workplace 2025, McKinsey and Lean In’s survey of 124 organizations covering roughly three million employees. At senior level the figures were 72 percent and 50 percent. Deloitte’s 2025 Women at Work study of 7,500 women across 15 countries found only 51 percent describing their mental health as good or extremely good, 25 percent having taken time off for mental health in the previous year, and almost 90 percent believing their manager would think negatively of them for disclosing it.
How hotter nights are cutting into sleep
The average person now also loses close to 56 hours of sleep a year — nearly seven full nights — to high nighttime temperatures, according to a Climate Central analysis published last month. About six of those hours are attributable to human-caused warming. Across 253 U.S. cities the average annual loss was 36 hours, roughly four of them climate-attributed, rising to seven to nine hours in Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada. Climate-linked sleep loss has at least doubled globally since the 1970s and roughly tripled in American cities.
Nights have been warming faster than days for decades. Average summer minimum temperatures rose 3.1°F across 231 U.S. locations since 1970, and those cities now average about 27 warmer-than-normal summer nights a year carrying a strong climate signal, against one such night annually in the 1970s, per Climate Central.
“The warmer it gets, the less that people sleep,” Kelton Minor, the environmental data scientist whose research established the relationship, told NPR in July. “Every additional increase per degree on that hot side leads to progressively less sleep.” Minor’s study of 47,628 adults across 68 countries, published in One Earth in 2022, found sleep declining by just over 14 minutes on nights above 30°C. The mechanism is specific. “We show that this erosion occurs primarily by delaying when people fall asleep and by advancing when they wake up during hot weather,” Minor said.
A 2025 study tracking 23.2 million days of sleep monitoring across 214,445 participants found that each 10°C rise raised the odds of insufficient sleep by 20.1 percent and cut deep sleep by 2.82 percent, the stage most affected. Housing determines who absorbs it. In Pacoima, one of the hottest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, indoor nighttime apparent temperature averaged 5°C higher than outdoors across 409 observation nights, and a 5°C rise indoors was associated with a 23-minute reduction in total sleep time. Nighttime heat waves cut sleep efficiency by 4 percent.
“Heat really finds the vulnerable people first,” Daniel Rifkin, a sleep doctor at Ognomy Sleep, told NPR. “It affects those the most that need the help the most.”
What sleep loss actually does to skin
Good sleepers show roughly 30 percent lower transepidermal water loss than poor sleepers, and a single night of deprivation produces significant reductions in skin hydration and elasticity, according to recent data. “Sleep is a process in which our skin recovers from the day,” consultant dermatologist Dr. Derrick Phillips told BBC Science Focus.
What sleep does not do is cause the feature the trend is built around. Dark undereye circles are largely structural and inherited — a matter of skin thickness, melanin, tear trough depth, and the shape of the eye socket. “We see this run in families. If your parents have dark circles, you’re more likely to develop them too,” Dr. Stefanie Williams, medical director of EUDELO Dermatology and Skin Wellbeing, told the same publication. Sleep loss produces puffiness through lymphatic drainage, which is a different thing entirely. The aesthetic being celebrated as evidence of a life fully lived is, for most people wearing it, heritable anatomy.
Not everyone reads the trend as progress. “The ‘tired girl’ trend is not a revolutionary concept that pushes to eradicate the patriarchy and help women accept themselves. It’s just another (poorly-packaged) cog in the same beauty-industry machine we’ve been feeding since the dawn of time,” Syeda Khaula Saad wrote in Betches.
Paljevic, who paints the look for a living, offered the plainest account of where it came from. “Gen Z is over perfection and craving authenticity, and just generally tired from experiencing multiple once-in-a-lifetime events and having to navigate one of the toughest job markets in decades,” she said.
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