Smoking and Skin Damage

Yes that's right, smoking can make you ugly in a lot of ways. For starters you'll get wrinkles and your skin will become floppy and gross at an early age.

There are three main components that your body produces to keep your skin looking smooth called elastin, collagen, and microfibrillar----I bet you can’t say that five times fast. When you smoke cigarettes it slows down the production of these two structural ingredients. When that happens, your skin loses elasticity and firmness.

So what? Well here’s an illustration for all you hands-on learners out there. With your right hand pinch a fold of skin in area between your thumb and forefinger on your opposite hand. See how it’s raised now that you’re pinching it? Now let it go. Lucky for you it probably snapped right back down like a rubber band. That’s elasticity.

Now imagine that after you pinched it your skin did not snap back in to place and that absurd raised fold of flesh is still there. That’s what smoking does to your skin.

Microfibrillar is the stuff that works with elastin to keep your skin looking firm. Without it your skin would look like a bag of wet clothes. When you smoke your body makes less and less of it over time. Have fun finding a date looking like a lump of dirty laundry.

Here is a video about how badly smoking can turn your face into an ugly deranged turnip and the type of hell you'd need to go through to fix it.

Information Source:

(Jan. 2007). Just M., Ribera M., Monsó E., Lorenzo J.C., Ferrándiz C. Effect of Smoking

on Skin Elastic Fibres: Morphometric and Immunohistochemical analysis. National Center for Biotechnology Information Dermatology Department. Retrieved July 11, 2012 from <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17199572>.