What Does Smoking Do To Your Skin?

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Smoking is known to be the single most powerful igniter of cancer worldwide and is identified to be the primary cause for a whopping 90 percent of all cancers. Apart from being a primary cause for cancer globally. Smoking tags along with it a number of other complications as well. In this article, let us understand the effects of smoking on the skin, especially in the context of aging.

If ever there is an evaluation of all the curses that have descended upon mankind, aging would figure right at the top. Nobody wants to age and grow old, do they? Knowing that aging is a not-so-lovable feeling, who would want to speed up the aging process?

Laboratory results have proven the lofty negative effects smoking has on the skin. In fact, nothing speeds up the aging process faster than smoking does. The effects, to say the least, are irreversible. Apart from the skin, the effects on the hair are equally pronounced.

Here is what smoking can do to your skin ...

Thinning Of Hair

Smoking, apart from having detrimental effects on your skin, also terribly affects your hair. The smoke coming out of a burning cigarette alters DNA structure of follicles of the hair, thereby causing them to thin and fall apart. Hair roots are weakened, giving way to premature balding.

Aging is premature

Now here is a startling fact for a start. Research studies have evinced that smoking is the biggest and most potent contributer to the aging process, more effective than heightened exposure to sunlight. Elastic fibers that hold skin layers together are loosened as a result of smoking, resulting in sagging of the skin. It also depletes oxygen content in the blood, a phenomenon that leads to various other complications including darkening of areas under the eye.

Gums and Teeth

This effect of smoking is one that is very evident. Smokers often have stained teeth, a direct and terrible affect of the nicotine content in cigarettes. Smoking also causes several other oral complications such as bleeding gums, bad breath and dryness.

The Lips

It is evident that smokers end up with black lips sooner than they would've imagined. Over time, smoking seriously affects the lips, causing them to turn black.

Scars and wrinkles

If you are a smoker, your skin would take longer to heal and recoup. This is mainly because of the depletion of oxygen levels in the blood, a direct impact of constriction of blood vessels in the skin. Wrinkles appear earlier in smokers than in normal people and are more deep and noticeable.

Psoriasis

This is an autoimmune condition wherein the skin starts to develop sports uncontrollably. The risk of psoriasis rises by almost 40 percent among smokers.