Smoking Can Make You Look Old

Everyone wishes to look good. The way we look and present ourselves plays an important role in many areas of our lives, especially when it comes to building good first impressions. Unfortunately, smoking does little to promote your general appearance, in particular, your complexion.

Smoking narrows the small blood vessels in your skin, thus reducing healthy blood flow. When this happens, the delivery of essential nutrients like collagen, vitamins and minerals are greatly reduced. Smoking also activates a type of enzyme which break down collagen, the main structural protein in the skin that keeps it elasticated.

Over time, your complexion deteriorates. Your skin will look dry, old and wrinkled. On top of that, frequent squinting from cigarette smoke leads to more wrinkles. You may look as though you're always frowning.

In addition, most smokers experience the darkening of their lips, a typical tell tale sign of a smoker. Other experts add that smoking worsens dark eye circles.

Smoking also affects the healing process of your skin. Wounds and scars tend to take longer time to heal. Smokers are at higher risks to infections and scabbing from operation wounds or open injuries.

Recent research on smoking confirmed that smoking increases one's risk of developing a common form of skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma. There are over 1.2 million new cases of squamous cell carcinoma in the U.S. each year.

Fortunately, these changes and risks are reversible. Upon quitting smoking, the skin begins to recover immediately. Within hours, circulation restores and repair continues each day. Risk of skin cancer is also reduced.

So to summarize, if you continue to smoke,

• You'll end up looking many years older

• Your skin develops poor healing abilities

• People can identify you as a smoker from the way you look

• You are exposed to high risk of developing skin cancer

Don't let smoking ruin the way you look. Stop the damage now before its too late.

**References
Action on Smoking and Health
National Library of Medicine
SkinCancerInfo Homepage