Ladies, Your Weekend Is Making You Look Terrible On Wednesday At 3:30 PM

It's 3:30 pm on a Wednesday.

You just got out of a brutal work meeting. Your mother won't stop emailing you about her stupid new curtains, and that mid-afternoon slump is hitting you harder than it's hit you all week.

When you have days like today, you can't help but think weekdays exist just to kill time in between weekends.

You can't help but fantasize about dropping absolutely everything and vegging on your couch in your apartment until Friday night, when you can finally -- finally -- be free from your responsibilities.

On the weekends, you can stay up late and go to the opening of that new club downtown.

You can binge on a wonderfully thick slice of cheesy pizza at 2 am. You can down cocktails without worrying about feeling like sh*t the next day at work.

You can do anything and everything in the name of releasing the heavy weight of all the anxiety and boredom you carried during the week.

On the weekends, when you're living for only yourself, it feels like anything goes.

Well, sure, you might feel great when you slip into your favorite Lucky Brand jeans on a Saturday night and charm some guy at the bar with your ability to chug beer or when you stay up late gabbing with your girlfriends about your boy problems over bottles of Pinot Grigio.

But those great feelings are short-lived -- and no, I'm not talking about the fact that you'll be hungover the next day.

Actually, your hangover is the least of your problems that will arise from your weekend sabotaging.

A study from St. Tropez, a popular tanning brand, found women look their oldest on Wednesdays at 3:30 pm.

It's a seemingly random time of the week, but apparently, it's also one that, mathematically, has terrible effects on your appearance.

This is because every reckless thing you consumed over the weekend -- those late nights dancing at the club, those sugary cocktails and carbonated beers and the magnificent, delicious, gooey cheese on that pizza -- takes around 72 hours to punish you physically.

Those toxins from your weekend shenanigans are still revealing themselves days after you engaged with them, and they hit their peak reveal each Wednesday.

And you thought your pulsating headache and nausea on Sunday morning was the worst of it, didn't you?

All of this, plus your stress levels from work (25 percent of women in the study admitted to feeling stressed at work several times per week) and your mid-week tendency to reach for an unhealthy snack instead of having a real lunch (almost 20 percent of women admitted to doing this), will make your skin its dullest and your energy its lowest on Wednesdays at 3:30 pm.

What's more, over a third of respondents in the study claimed that their worst night of sleep during the week is on Monday nights -- and, to make things worse, the negative effects of sleeplessness take 48 hours to show on your face.

So, in addition to the aging from the stress, the booze and the sugar, aging from lack of sleep will show itself the most on Wednesday, too.

The mid-week slump also affects your tendency to take good care of your skin.

The study found that one in 10 women will abandon her normal skin care routine on Wednesdays, which doesn't help with the whole looking-your-worst thing.

St. Tropez skin expert Nichola Joss emphasizes the importance of maintaining your skin care routine during the week, especially on Wednesday.

She stresses the importance of making sure you at least wash your face to unclog any pores that might make your face look duller and dirtier.

After all, your skin is already going to suffer from everything else you did internally, so you might as well help it out by sticking to what will benefit it externally.

Fortunately, this slump is over when Wednesday is over. In fact, it becomes completely reversed: According to the study, Thursday is the day women are most likely to have sex, giving them the rosy, youthful glow they were lacking the day before.

Unsurprisingly, 60 percent of women in the study reported feeling their best on Fridays.

It's probably because, at last, they feel rejuvenated enough to repeat whatever damage they did to themselves the weekend before.

When the weekend finally arrives, it's time for some more wonderful misadventures -- and for, inevitably, another sh*tty Wednesday.

Look, maybe your Wednesday is different. Maybe you have a wonderful outfit on, and you just got your nails done.

Maybe you're having a particularly relaxing workweek, and you didn't even go out drinking this past weekend.

Maybe you live with your boyfriend and had sex the night before, and he even let you do that weird role play you've been dying to try, and you orgasmed from it.

What this study is trying to say is your bad decisions can't be magically forgotten on Sunday nights, during which time you prepare to re-emerge for the week as a juice-cleansing, gym-going, anal-retentive workaholic.

Your mind may be able to suppress the memory of you spending a barbaric Saturday night inhaling every flavor of pizza that Gino at the pizza place would let you get your drunken hands on -- but your body remembers.

And it will punish you for it.