The Impact of Smoking on Your Skin and How to Turn It Around
Smoking accelerates the aging process. Photo by lil artsy.
No Smoking Day, observed on the second Wednesday in March, serves as an important reminder to prioritize your health and take steps toward quitting smoking. If you’re still smoking, you’re not only affecting your internal health, but your skin is also taking a big hit.
Let’s take a closer look at how smoking accelerates the aging process and why quitting today can make a world of difference for your skin.
1. Sagging Skin: Did you know that tobacco smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals? Many of these chemicals break down collagen and elastin, the two fibers responsible for keeping your skin strong and elastic. Smoking or even being exposed to secondhand smoke can degrade these essential building blocks, leading to sagging skin and deeper wrinkles. Over time, this can make your skin appear much older than it is.
2. Lines Around Your Lips: Smoking delivers a double blow to the skin around your mouth. First, there’s the smoker’s pucker. When you puff on a cigarette, specific muscles around your lips are engaged, causing dynamic wrinkles that nonsmokers typically don’t have. Second, smoking causes the skin to lose its elasticity, making those lines even more prominent. The result? Deep wrinkles around your lips make you look older.
3. Age Spots: those darker blotches of skin that commonly appear on the face and hands are another result of smoking. While anyone can develop these from excessive sun exposure, research suggests that smokers are more prone to them. Nicotine causes blood vessels to narrow, reducing oxygen flow and nutrients to skin cells, which in turn accelerates the appearance of age spots. The longer you smoke, the more likely you are to see these signs of aging on your face and hands.
The good news? When you quit smoking, you’re giving your skin a fighting chance against premature aging. Your skin will become more resilient and less prone to wrinkles, sagging, and other visible signs of aging. As for the wrinkles and age spots you already have, all is not lost. Treatments like Microneedling and Chemical Peels, followed by topical retinoids and antioxidants, can help improve the outer layers of your skin, where the damage is most noticeable. These treatments work wonders at restoring a more youthful appearance.
The next time you look in the mirror, think about how quitting smoking can also benefit your skin.
