What Smoking Does To Your Skin

Smoking not only causes various forms of cancers, lung and heart disease, but also inflicts severely negative effects to your skin. Here are a few terrible side effects on your skin caused by smoking:

1. Premature Aging – Smoking accelerates the aging process of the skin. Many smokers have droopy and wrinkly skin. Their complexion looks dry and course with uneven colors and visibly broken blood vessels. So how does smoking cause premature aging of the skin? There are a few realistic theories:

a. Many smokers have very wrinkly skin around their mouth area, and experts believe the cause is the heat of the cigarette slowly burning the skin.
b. Smoking causes the elastic fibers of the skin to change and break down.
c. When you smoke, the blood supply to the skin is reduced, causing loss of collagen

2. Reduced healing properties – Your skin has the ability to heal itself from cuts, gashes, wounds and bruises. When you smoke, your skin no longer receives the proper amount of blood supply needed to conduct its healing process, thus slowing this function down. A lower blood supply to your skin means less collagen production and the delayed growth of new blood vessels to take care of the wound, resulting in longer healing times.

3. Risk of Disease – Smoking is associated with an increased risk of getting viral infections, like warts. Individuals with genital warts who happen to be smokers have a greater chance to develop cancers that are associated with the wart-virus.

Smokers also have a higher risk of getting psoriasis and can be more severe and extensive in these cases. While psoriasis itself is an auto-immune condition, smoking agravates the chances of developing it through th negavite efects smoking does to the immune system.

4. Skin Cancers – Compared to non-smokers, those who smoke have TWICE the risk of developing squamous cell carcinoma, a type of non-melanoma skin cancer. There’s also the risk of getting different kinds of oral cancers.

5. Hair Thinning – The toxic chemicals found in cigarette smoke can damage the DNA of hair follicles, resulting in weaker hair strands. Smokers’ hair also tend to go gray sooner than nonsmokers. Studies show that men who smoke are likely to lose their hair at twice the rate than nonsmokers.

So please think twice before you smoke, or if you do currently smoke then please try to quit this terrible habit before it can cause severe damage to your body.