If you want your skin to look healthier and younger, you’re going to need to start leading a healthier lifestyle. You can apply hundreds of creams and serums, but until you change your unhealthy habits they will continue to undermine your efforts. When it comes to skin health, environmental factors are at least equally as important as genetics. Smoking and secondhand smoke both cause damage to the skin and age it. It’s no secret that smoke sabotages health, but just how exactly it can change your appearance is often overlooked. Keep reading to find out how and why smoking and secondhand smoke are the archenemies of skin care. 

Nutrient Deprivation 

One of the lesser spoken about effects of the nicotine and carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke is that they narrow blood vessels (1, 2). This causes a reduction in blood flow to the organs, which in turn reduces the amount of nutrients that are delivered to the organs. This is particularly important for your skin because your skin is your largest organ. In order for your skin to thrive, its needs must be met. By sabotaging the delivery system that keeps your skin happy and healthy, you actually deprive the skin and it starts to weaken and age more quickly.

Collagen And Elastin Breakdown

Collagen and elastin are proteins that are two of the most important support structures of the skin. For starters, collagen helps your skin maintain its ideal shape while elastin helps it to stretch and bend when necessary. When collagen levels are low, wrinkles and creases set in and when elastin levels are low skin takes longer to return to its ideal shape after being pressed or stretched.

Smoke from cigarettes containing tobacco is made up of thousands of chemicals, many of which impair elastin and collagen production. Smoking increases the production of tropoelastin and matrix metalloproteinases which degrade collagen and elastin (3). In essence, smoking destroys the structure of skin and increases the appearance of wrinkles and unhealthy skin.

Pucker Lines

Holding a cigarette to your lips to take a drag causes you to make a face, for lack of a better expression. Smoking a cigarette causes the lips to scrunch together and uses certain muscles that non-smokers use less frequently. This frequent condensing of the skin around the lips becomes more permanent as time goes by until smokers develop dynamic wrinkles, meaning that the wrinkles become more pronounced when you use those muscles. For an example of dynamic wrinkles, think about smile lines that appear when you smile but fade when the expression passes. Between the wrinkles caused by the breakdown of collagen and elastin and the dynamic wrinkles of a smoker’s pucker, smoking can really do some damage to the area around your lips and your lips themselves.

Squinter Lines And Under-Eye Circles

Similar to causing a smoker’s pucker, smoking cigarettes also causes squinter lines around the eyes. Smokers often squint their eyes in order to keep smoke out of them, which causes a frequent tightening of the muscles around the eyes. This causes the unattractively named “crow’s feet” to set in earlier than they would otherwise. Crinkles around the eyes and sagging eyelids tend to happen naturally with age, but they happen unnaturally fast in smokers (4). Additionally, nicotine withdrawal during sleep may negatively impact sleep and cause under-eye circles (5). 

What Creams Can Do For You?

Topical face creams can help support or increase collagen production to help fill in wrinkles and fine lines. However, both smoking and aging decrease collagen production, meaning your facial cream has to fight twice as hard, and frankly, 2 vs. 1 isn’t very fair. Quit smoking today to level the battlefield and give your skin a fighting chance against wrinkles and the signs of aging.