Dark Circles: Find the Cause Before Buying the Cream
By the KABO Nutrition Team · fact-checked against cited public-health sources.
Dark circles have four common and quite different causes — pigmentation, visible blood vessels through thin skin, hollowing from lost volume, and shadow from bone structure. Creams help only the first, which is why most people's eye cream disappoints them.
- Pull the skin taut: if the colour stays, it is pigment; if it fades, it is vascular.
- Genetic pigmentation is very common in Indian skin and responds slowly.
- Iron deficiency and poor sleep both deepen the appearance markedly.
- Hollowing is structural — no cream fills it.
- Sunscreen under the eyes prevents worsening better than any treatment reverses it.
Four causes, four different answers
- Pigmentation — genuine excess melanin in the under-eye skin. Common in Indian skin, often familial. Responds slowly to topical treatment.
- Vascular — blood vessels showing through unusually thin skin, reading blue or purple. Worsened by fatigue, dehydration and allergies.
- Structural — a hollow tear trough casting a shadow. Ageing or genetics. Creams cannot fill a hollow.
- Mixed — most adults, in practice.
The test: gently stretch the skin sideways. If the darkness stays, it is pigment. If it lightens, it is vascular or structural.
What actually helps pigmentation
- Broad-spectrum sunscreen under the eyes daily — the single most effective step, and the most skipped.
- Vitamin C in the morning, for antioxidant support and gradual brightening.
- Niacinamide, well tolerated and useful for pigment.
- A low-strength retinoid a few nights weekly, introduced slowly — this skin is thin and irritates easily.
- Patience: pigment responds over three to six months, not three weeks.
The two internal causes worth checking
Iron deficiency is extremely common in Indian women and produces pallor that makes under-eye vessels more visible. If your circles arrived alongside fatigue, breathlessness on stairs or poor concentration, a ferritin test is more useful than another cream.
Sleep affects circles through two routes: fluid pooling, and vasodilation that makes vessels more prominent. This is the one cause where the folk wisdom is entirely correct.
What does not work
Cucumber, potato slices and cold tea bags provide brief vasoconstriction and mild de-puffing. That is a real but temporary effect lasting minutes to an hour, and none of them treats pigment.
Lemon juice under the eyes is actively harmful — it is acidic, photosensitising, and applied to the thinnest skin on the face. Do not.
Feeding the skin, and the blood behind it
Under-eye skin is roughly the thinnest on the body, which makes it the first place both pigment and pallor show. Two nutritional levers matter: iron status, which governs how much colour your blood carries, and the protein and micronutrients skin is rebuilt from.
KABO contributes to both. A serving supplies 23–25 g of complete plant protein plus 26 vitamins and minerals and 60+ superfoods, at around 198 kcal — covering the micronutrient breadth that a rushed Indian breakfast almost never does, and doing it before 9am.
If a blood test shows genuine iron deficiency, treat that with your doctor. Nutrition supports the picture; it does not replace a diagnosis.
Frequently asked questions
Will an eye cream remove my dark circles?
Only if they are pigmentary, and then slowly over months. Vascular and structural circles do not respond meaningfully to creams.
Can lack of sleep alone cause them?
It can cause and worsen them, but if they persist despite good sleep the cause is likely pigmentary, structural or related to iron status.
Are dark circles hereditary?
Frequently, yes. Periorbital hyperpigmentation runs in families and is particularly common in South Asian skin.
References
- ICMR-NIN, Dietary Guidelines for Indians (2024). nin.res.in
- World Health Organization, Healthy diet fact sheet. who.int
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