If you are ever one who watches programs on television from time to time, you will observe that the people they often chose for makeover programs to show where they are trying to make people look five years younger or thereabouts are those who smoke.
The reason for this is simply due to the fact that smokers will generally appear a lot older than others of the same age.
So, if you are one to smoke and need another reason to motivate yourself to quit smoking, add premature wrinkles to the list.
The normal aging process of your skin can be sped up by smoking while also contributing to wrinkles. Skin changes may only occur after ten years of smoking. The longer you smoke cigarettes and the more plentiful, the more skin wrinkling you are likely to have—even though early skin damage due to smoking may be difficult for you to see initially. Smoking is the top predictor of facial wrinkling, aside from age, in men and women.
Smoking is also associated with increased skin damage and wrinkles on other parts of your body and not just on your face, including your inner arms. You can still prevent worsening of your wrinkles by quitting smoking now, while the skin wrinkles may not be reversible.
You make question in what way and how does smoking lead to wrinkles. The answer is, the nicotine in cigarettes causes the narrowing of the blood vessels in the outermost layers of the skin. This then results in impaired blood flow to your skin and with less blood flow, your skin does not get the appropriate oxygen and important nutrients, such as vitamin A.
Of the more than 4,000 chemicals in tobacco, many can also damage elastin and collagen, which are fibers that provide your skin with strength and elasticity. This results in the sagging of your skin and premature wrinkles because of smoking.
Repeated exposure to heat from the burning of cigarettes and the facial expressions you make when smoking—such as pursing your lips when inhaling and squinting your eyes to keep out smoke—contributes greatly to wrinkles.
For making the skin seem old, tired, and unhealthy smoking is only second to overexposure to the sun. there are of course plenty of other factors that need consideration with smoking such as lung cancer that will surely shorten your life and decrease your quality of life along the way.
Teeth discoloration is something associated with aging but smoking will also discolor your teeth. For those who are avid smokers, their hair will also usually be somewhat discolored too.
There is a lot of goodness from the body that smoking will leech out and that will be shown in the skin causing a lifeless dry condition.
When adding all of these negative effects together it becomes pretty easy to see why smokers seem so much older for their age and how quitting and eliminating smoking from one’s life can stop the speed of the aging process and to some extent reverse the trend.
Once you finally are able to quit smoking then various skin treatments, tooth whitening procedures, and other positive anti-aging processes can be done to help you look considerably younger and healthier, provided you do not resort to smoking again.
