Beauty editors see thousands of products every year—but it’s the ones they always go back to that should be noted. In Can’t Quit YouThe Kit beauty director Katherine Lalancette shares the products she can’t live without.

Is there no greater luxury than sleep? The sweet rapture of complete and utter rest. Your heavy limbs sinking into the mattress, your busy brain drifting away to dreamland. For eight hours, your only job is to check out, leg go, surrender…

I wish children knew how good they have it. It’s like, “Your Power Rangers will still be there tomorrow, Timmy. Now please, revel in the bliss that is sleep while you still can.” Honestly, if a spa offered a “bedtime story and blanky” package, I’d have a weekly standing appointment.

Even more mind-boggling are the full-grown adults who wear their sleep deprivation like a badge of honour. Pepsi’s former CEO Indra Nooyi bragged about only getting four hours of shut-eye a night, as did Bill Clinton. The latter adopted the practice after one of his college professors told him “Great men often require less [sleep] than ordinary people.”

Well call me an ordinary woman, Bill, but my passion for rest is backed by clinical research. Studies, loads of them, have shown that sleep is no idle waste of time. Rather, it is essential to our health and happiness, affecting everything from our alertness and weight to our mood and memory.

It’s the difference between snapping at your partner because they forgot the hot sauce or having zilch to contribute to the brainstorm and being your sunniest, idea-churning self. That matters to me, which is why I revere sleep as the most sacred of rituals. I even built a little shrine to it on my nightstand. There’s my version of a bedtime story, usually some titillating biography (no self-help books allowed; this is about pleasure, not duty), the body lotion I slather while horizontal (I believe in marinating overnight) and the crowning jewel: my pillow mist.

Every night, the fine droplets herald the official end to the day. I breathe in their soothing aroma of lavender and chamomile, letting it store away the mental to-do lists and carry me into Morpheus’s arms. This isn’t some placebo effect. The international bestseller has actually been proven to help people fall asleep faster and wake up more refreshed.

But what I love most about the gesture is how extravagantly deliberate it is. It’s a statement, one that says “I am worthy of deep, delicious slumber.” And in a world where sleeplessness is often glorified, that’s a message we all need to hear sometimes. Even you, Bill.

This Works Deep Sleep Pillow Spray, $34, sephora.ca

 

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