How Smoking Ruins Your Look

By Nikita Mukherjee

Aging is mankind’s curse and smoking only facilitates the bane that’s aging! Most know that smoking is bad for health. It is associated with several detrimental diseases including lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

However, only few know that when you take a puff, you are also causing irreversible damage to your skin and hair.

Shocked? Don’t be because that little stick of hopeless nicotine plays the devil’s advocate when it comes to ruining your look.

Premature Aging

As you age, your skin ages, too. There are number of external factors that contribute to premature aging including sun exposure, which is considered to the biggest factor. However, various studies prove that smoking causes an individual’s skin to age even more than exposure to sunlight. Smoke loosens up the elastic fibres in your skin, which causes skin to sag. It also causes sunken eyes and grayish skin, due to the lack of oxygen in blood and ruins your look.

Wrinkles

Everyone gets wrinkles around the eyes eventually. But, these wrinkles arrive early and are deeper among smokers. Heat from burning cigarettes and squinting eyes to keep the smoke away, contribute to visible crow’s feet. Also, chemicals from inhaled smoke or even tobacco cause internal damage to your skin structure and blood vessels around your eyes.

Damaged Teeth and Gums

You would love to have set of dazzling teeth, don’t you? However, you can kiss that dream goodbye if you’re a smoker. The nicotine in cigarettes can stain teeth which ruins your look. But, we assume you already know this! The ‘you’re kidding’ factor comes from the fact that smokers are twice as likely to lose teeth as non-smokers owing to gum disease that they are at a risk of developing. Not to forget, bad breath is also a persistent problem among smokers.

Thinner Hair

And as if the wrinkly skin is not enough, smoking affects hair, too. Smoking accelerates aging as the smoke releases toxins that damage the DNA of hair follicles. As a result, hair becomes brittle and is likely to break before it’s fully grown. While light smokers are at risk of staining their hair yellow brought on by the nicotine, heavy smokers are prone to baldness.

Psoriasis

It is a chronic and ugly condition that causes thick, scaly patches on the skin - usually knees, elbows, hands, feet and scalp. While the condition is not life threatening, it can be extremely disfiguring and uncomfortable. Smokers have a greater risk of developing this disease and the probability increases with the longer duration a person smokes.

Scarring

Nicotine causes constriction of blood vessels. As a result, the oxygen-rich blood flow will be limited to your face and other parts of body. That actually means your wounds will take longer to heal and you’ll have scars that will be bigger and redder.

You don’t need more proof that smoking actually ruins your look. So, make this World's No Tobacco Day your lucky day, the day you quit smoking!

Source: How Smoking Ruins Your Look