Negative Effects of Smoking Cigarettes on the Skin
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
Looking beautifully, young and attractive, having a healthy complexion is essential for almost every woman. We are constantly looking for and testing new cosmetics and if it was possible we would spend enormous amounts of money to improve the way we look, to have ideal skin and complexion.
What difference does it make, however, if many of these women still smoke cigarettes?
If you smoke, all the beautifying treatments you spend so much time and money on, have little or no effect at all. None of the treatments are able to cure the damage which is caused by smoking. If we choose smoking, we choose action which is contradictory to our efforts aiming at remaining healthy, young and beautiful for a long time. From the outside, we try to supply our skin with the best nutritional components while at the same time we destroy the skin’s texture from the inside by smoking cigarettes. It is not possible to find good resolution to our skin problems if we concentrate on fighting the harmful effects without removing the negative cause first. Cosmetics have influence on the outer parts of skin mainly and their active components cannot reach the deepest layers of inner skin where the most serious damage caused by smoking takes place. In consequence, the negative effects of this damage can be seen on the outside of skin.
I am aware, of course, that after reading my article it hardly probable that many people decide to quit smoking immediately and the aim of my article is not to preach my readers, either. I only would like to make fully aware of the true consequences of smoking all these young women who decide to smoke cigarettes. It has been told and written so much in different media about bad influence of smoking on human health that there is no need to repeat these thing once more. I am interested mainly in giving the basic facts concerning the influence of smoking on appearance and functioning of our skin.
What are the Effects of Smoking on Skin
The threat of cancer or heart diseases is not enough reason for young people to stop smoking. They are convinced that these problems are the problems of older people not theirs. However, negative aspects of smoking can become visible outside much faster than it seems. In time the way our complexion looks is getting worse and worse. This problem concerns both men and women, although in women negative changes are noticeable sooner because they occur faster. This may be the crucial argument for all women who want to smoke.
It seems very advantageous for us that recently it has been written and told a lot about the negative aspects of solar radiation, for example UVA or UVB on our skin. On the other hand, smoking is as much harmful, if not more, to our skin as sunbathing without the use of UVA/UVB creams. Clinical tests which have been made for many recent years, have proved that the skin of a smoker is getting older faster than that of a non-smoking person. It has been shown, for instance, that the skin of forty-year-old people who have been smoking for years, may be as much destroyed as the skin of seventy-year-old non-smokers. Doctors call the type of changes that undergo inside human skin as “tobacco face” syndrome.
First of all, during the process of smoking there are produces huge amounts of so-called free radicals. They are very active elements which attack and destroy skin cells and this smoking causes wrinkles. In every article, I have written, I tried to emphasize the idea of the sun protection, not only during the summertime but through the whole year round. The solar radiation may cause premature skin ageing because it generates the producing of free radicals to large extent. It is useless, though, to protect our skin with the help of UVA/UVB creams or antioxidants while, in the meantime, we continue smoking. In such case, smoking becomes even more treacherous than our exposure to the sunlight without any protection.
