I got this off the net. especially for the Ladies
Smoking and Your Skin
The marketing world, fashion magazines and Hollywood movies may be working overtime to make smoking look like a glamorous
practice of chic people, but for your skin, it’s a habit that is anything but beautiful. A grayish, suffocating complexion, creases, furrows, and lines around your mouth and eyes, and nicotine-stained nails, not to mention skin cancer, are just a few of the legacies smoking leaves on your looks.
In fact, smokers have a nearly five times greater chance of being crisscrossed with a roadmap of wrinkles than those who don’t smoke. Wrinkling and a less than glowing complexion are such prominent side effects of lighting up that in 2001 Germany used this fact as one of its main reasons for women to quit during its annual anti-smoking campaign.
Researchers have suspected as far back as the mid 1800s that smoking can damage your looks and lead to the bluntly stated “smoker’s face.†Today, doctors and researchers, and probably you too, can pick a smoker out of crowd even without a cigarette dangling from their lips because well, they look like smokers. Part of that may be due to the fact that for every ten years of smoking, your face ages 14 years. So, if you start smoking in high school, when you’re popping champagne corks at 50 your face will actually be celebrating it’s 62nd birthday. Alos, if you have a non-smoking identical twin, the changes are even more obvious. Identical twin studies have revealed that smokers have thinner skin, more gray hair and more facial wrinkling than their smoke-free counterpart.
If you’re one of the estimated 3,000 teens who become regular smokers each day, consider this: you won’t have to wait until middle age to see the damage that puffing away can do. A study by dermatologists in Seoul, Korea and published in the International Journal of Dermatology, reported that smokers are three times as likely to develop unsightly lines and creases, and that premature wrinkling caused by smoking can show up in people as young as 20 years old. What’s more is that their wrinkles are twice as rough and pronounced as those found on their non-smoking peers.
If that doesn’t stop you from lighting up, researchers in New Zealand found that those who picked up the habit in their teens already had gum damage by their 20s no matter how great their oral care habits were.
So how does smoking do its damage? In a couple of ways. One, it messes with the microvasculature (the circulatory pathways nourishing, oxygen rich blood uses to get around) of your skin. After a regular smoker has a cigarette, it takes about five minutes for this system to recover. Researchers speculate that this constant assault, sort of like suffocating your skin from the inside, adds to the smoker’s face phenomenon.
Researchers in both England and Germany have also found that smoking triggers matrix metalloproteinase 1, or MMP-1, an enzyme that destroys collagen. Collagen, which makes up about 70 percent of your skin’s weight, is the elastic, spongy network of fibers that essentially creates the skin’s structure. When you destroy collagen, you wreck the architecture of your skin and what you are left with is a ruin of sagging and wrinkling.
Just the physical action of smoking, pursing your lips around the cigarette and squinting your eyes to protect them from the smoke, over and over and over, pack after pack, adds up to lines creeping out around your lips and crows feet radiating out from around your eyes. The nicotine in cigarettes can also act as a diuretic, draining your skin of moisture leaving it looking parched and drawn.
Perhaps the most damaging effect smoking can have upon your skin is the formation of squamous cell carcinoma, a serious form of skin cancer. Researchers at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands studied about 1,000 people and discovered that those who smoked more than a pack a day saw their squamous cell carcinoma risk more than quadruple. Think you are in the clear if you don’t finish off a pack every day? Think again. The study showed that if you polish off a half to a full pack your risk triples versus a non-smoker. Those who just dabble, smoking ten or fewer cigarettes a day, bumped up their risk two and a half times. Quitting can help dial down your risk. Former smokers had just under twice the risk factor as those who didn’t smoke at all.
While the study didn’t show an increase in the scarier form of skin cancer, melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma is still a dangerous situation, and having the lesion removed is no walk in the park and can leave a scar or worse.
If you’re also baking yourself in the sun hoping for a nut brown tan while lighting up a cigarette there’s even more bad news. Researchers published a study in the Lancet that looked at the usually-in-the-dark buttock skin of volunteers and found that the smokers’ skin was already producing MMP-1, the collagen destroying enzyme also thought to be responsible for sun damage, before their skin was even exposed to damaging ultraviolet light. That’s right, they were basically creating sun-damaged skin without the sun. The upshot is that if you are tanning and smoking (remember each year of smoking is 1.4 years of aging), you are compounding the situation.
What can you do to undo the damage wrought by smoking? Well, the first thing is, obviously, to quit. Within hours, even minutes, your body’s functions begin to return to normal which benefits your skin by supplying it with plenty of oxygen and nutrients. You may be able to tackle some of the finer lines and wrinkles with various exfoliating peels and rejuvenating moisturizers that speed up the skins turnover rate (like alpha hydroxy acids or Retin-A). If you’ve deep furrows or your lips are punctuated with lots of feathery lines, check with your dermatologist about deeper peels or injectable fillers that can plump up those areas again.
Karmen B. Saran
Contributing writer to DERMAdoctor.com.
Topic: Smoking (Read 8836 times)