Does smoking cigarettes cause wrinkles?
In a word, yes. Smoking accelerates the aging process of the skin, although you may not start to see the effects of this until you have been smoking for 10 or more years. The effects cannot be reversed by stopping smoking later in life. You would have to look towards a cosmetic anti-wrinkle treatment in order to improve your appearance.
How does this happen?
Smoking is known to narrow blood vessels. This means that there is a decreased blood flow to the skin. The blood provides nutrients to the skin and removes waste products, so effectively by smoking you reduce the efficiency of the body's internal feeding and cleansing system. This means that Vitamin A is not delivered effectively to the skin, together with other nutrients and moisture that build and maintain its elastin and collagen structure. Your skin may also be paler or ashen in colour due to the decreased blood flow. This does not only affect the skin on your face - skin over your entire body may become less firm as a result of smoking.
In addition, the characteristic vertical lines above the lips may be exaggerated by the continual action of smokers puffing on a cigarette, together with hollowed cheeks and wrinkles around the eyes, caused by creasing the eyes in response to the irritant effect of the cigarette smoke. However, research has shown that these wrinkles may actually be caused by thickening of the elastic fibres of the skin which is caused by smoking. This is similar to the effect that sunlight has on the skin - except that smokers have this type of skin in areas that don't normally see the sun (!)
Fact
On average, a smoker will have wrinkles equivalent to a non smoker twenty years older.
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