Smoking Damages Your Skin

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Smoking Damages Your Skin

Smoking Damages Your Skin

There are several reasons to stop smoking, most importantly you should stop smoking for your health. But, if the damage you are doing to the inside or your body isn’t enough of a deterrent, perhaps you should consider what you are doing to the outside. In addition to the bad breath, yellow teeth, and yellow fingers, smoking is slowly but surely destroying your skin and making your skin age much faster than nonsmokers.

Smoking causes the skin to wrinkle, appear gaunt, and develop an odd colored complexion. Your skin actually becomes much weaker and, therefore, less resilient. When this is seen in the face, it is often referred to as “smoker’s face.” Smokers in their 40’s and 50’s often have wrinkles in their faces equivalent to those found in nonsmokers 20 years older.

These effects are sometimes reversible if the smoker quits early enough, but decades of smoking may well mean that it is too late to reverse the effects. Some studies have shown that 40 and 50 year olds who only smoked during their teenage years and while they were in their 20’s had excessive wrinkling for their age. Many of them regained the pink hue to their skin, but never lost the premature wrinkles.

The lack of oxygen caused by smoking is responsible for damage to skin cells by disturbance of the flow of blood to the skin. Smoking for only 10 minutes decreases the oxygen supply to the skin for almost an hour. The nicotine within the cigarette narrows blood vessels and prevents the blood from properly circulating to the capillaries, which are tiny blood vessels, as well as to the upper layers of the skin. The capillaries are responsible for nourishing the skin. When they are not capable of properly performing their job, more wrinkles, as well as deeper wrinkles result.

One study found that smoking actually switches on a gene that destroys collagen, the protein that provides skin with its elasticity. Without elasticity, skin is unable to “bounce back” to its original shape when it is stretched, ultimately leading to wrinkles.

Smokers also lack the “healthy glow” found on the skin of those who don’t smoke. The natural pinkish color to their cheeks is lost and replaced by a grayish tinge. Nutritional depletion combined with lack of oxygen flow, both results of smoking, may attribute to this phenomenon.

Because smoking restricts the flow of blood and oxygen to the skin, it also interferes with the healing process. Wounds to the skin will therefore take longer to heal in a smoker, and often produce greater scarring. This can be amply demonstrated when you look at patients who smoke and are recovering from surgery, as they routinely take longer to heal than non-smokers..

There is also increasing evidence that smoking causes the skin to thin excessively. Researchers at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London performed an interesting study in which they compared 25 sets of identical twins. In each of these sets, one twin was a smoker and the other was not. With one particular set of twins in their 50’s, an ultrasound revealed that the smoking twin’s skin was 40% thinner than the other twins’ skin. In addition, she had much deeper wrinkles and fewer pores. In the remaining 24 sets of twins, similar results were found, though the difference was not as marked.

Skin cancer can often be attributed to smoking. Research has established that smokers are three times as likely to develop a specific type of skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma, than those who don’t smoke. The risk diminishes upon cessation of smoking, but does not generally return to the lower risk found in the non-smoking population. Skin cancer can leave unattractive marks and result in ugly scarring is responsible for 9,800 deaths in the United States every year, with 2,000 of those being from squamous cell carcinoma. It therefore flows from that information, that a large number of that 2,000 deaths per year are directly attributable to smoking.

As you may imagine, the only sure way to reverse the aging effects smoking has on skin is to stop smoking, and the sooner the better. It may not be possible to reverse the effects by any method. The only sure way to age at the rate nature intended for you is not to smoke at all. Certainly, no anti-aging creams or medications or supplements of any type will help to any significant degree if you continue to smoke. Eating a healthy diet won’t even alter the effects smoking has on the skin. Sadly, quitting smoking may not even be enough, particularly after the damage has already occurred. For those who started smoking when they were teenagers in order to look more “mature,” they will certainly get their wish when they are 40 years old and look 60!

But that said, if you're currently a smoker and are worried about your appearance, smoking cessation is the only way you're going to be able to give your skin a chance to stop aging before your time. Stop smoking now and some of the ill effects on your skin may possibly be reversed. Certainly, the premature aging of your skin will be arrested if you stop smoking as opposed to continuing to smoke.

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