How Does Smoking Effect the Skin?
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While many know smoking can cause harmful effects to the body, such as increased risk of lung cancer and staining the teeth, smoking can also affect the skin's appearance.
When you smoke, the blood vessels in your epidermis narrow. The decreased blood flow to your skin prevent oxygen and other nutrients from reaching the skin. In addition, smoking damages collagen and elasticity in the skin, which can accelerate wrinkles and cause sagging. The face is not the only portion affected: skin on the entire body may age prematurely as a result.
Additional Effects
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The decreased blood flow on the face is not the only contributor to wrinkles due to smoking. Exposure to cigarette smoke, which causes squinting, and the act of smoking itself, which can create wrinkles around the mouth, can cause additional sagging and wrinkles related to the skin.
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Smoker's Skin Appearance
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These effects, as well as Vitamin C depletion of the skin due to smoking, can cause a person's skin to appear dull and discolored or gray. Deeper-set wrinkles around the mouth and eyes also may result due to loss of elasticity. Research has shown that these effects can lead people's skin to look 10 to 20 years older, according to a study published in the Archives of Dermatology, which examined the skin of smokers and non-smokers ages 22 to 91 (BBC.com, 2007). The study assigned skin aging based on a 10-point scale (with each point representing 10 years). The difference between smokers and nonsmokers who were over the age of 65 was around 2 points, while smokers and nonsmokers under age 45 was about 1 point.
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