I guess I remain surprised that people still smoke. It has been proven time and again that smoking causes cancer and can kill you – so I ask myself “why do people still smoke?”. I even know lots of estheticians who smoke which surprises me on so many levels especially since an esthetician knows very well how smoking can ruin your skin.
Let me break it down for you how smoking ruins your skin: smoking causes your blood vessels to constrict which means your skin literally starts to asphyxiate - you’re starving your skin cells of oxygen. Since oxygen isn’t getting to your cells in order to help them rebuild they don’t regenerate as quickly as normal and your skin cell turnover slows down. As you continue to smoke you’ll get fine lines around your lips, and your skin will be rougher and thicker not to mention dull in color. The carcinogens in the tobacco smoke degrades collagen and elastin, just as sunlight does, so your skin becomes less elastic and more wrinkled over time. As you smoke you overuse certain muscles in the face leaving you not only with the wrinkles around the mouth, as already mentioned, but with lines between your eyes and crow’s-feet from squinting all the time (see the photo below as an illustration of what this looks like). Additionally, smoking can make undereye circles worse. And if all those bad things that can happen to your skin from smoking aren’t enough to convince you to quit smoking also know that smoking is associated with the development of skin cancer because of the build-up of toxins around your face and mouth and the damage caused to the DNA in the skin tissue from the smoke.
I’ll leave you with this statistic as a last thought. According to The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 23% of smokers think smoking looks attractive, versus 1.5% of nonsmokers. So smoking does NOT equal sexy.
Source: Simple Skin Beauty by Dr. Ellen Marmur – pages 46-47
Further reading: Get Serious with Clients About Smoking - Skin Inc.
A recent study done shows that a few puffs of cigarette smoke can cause genetic damage within minutes.
http://news.discovery.com/human/smoking-cigarettes-genetic-damage-110115.html
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