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World No Tobacco Day 2013: 8 reasons why smoking is bad for your beauty

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Written By: Editorial Team | Updated : June 11, 2014 6:45 PM IST

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May 31 is World No Tobacco Day. While smoking can cause serious ailments like mouth and lung cancer, affect your sex life and fertility, it also ruins the skin - especially of the face - making one look much older than their age due to the appearance of early wrinkles. While smoking worsens both men and women's skin, women seem to be more susceptible to its ill effects. Dr Kiran Lohia, MD, and Face Yoga Expert Danielle Collins explain how smoking ruins the skin in detail with methods to undo the damage.

Beauty isn't just skin deep

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It is the complex structure below the skin which is responsible for how it looks and feel. Smoking affects these underlying sturctures and speeds up the ageing of your skin in four ways:

  1. Firstly, the nicotine in cigarettes makes the blood vessels in the skin smaller and thinner, thereby reducing blood flow. This reduces the amount of nutrition and oxygen that your skin can get. So, you are essentially starving your skin.
  2. Harmful ingredients in cigarette smoke (more than 4000 of them!) end up damaging your skin's elastin and collagen the fibres which make your skin more supple and elastic. Ultimately, this causes your skin to sag more and adds to the early appearance of wrinkles.
  3. The heat that you are exposed to from burning cigarettes can also add to the formation of wrinkles by causing repeated trauma to the skin.
  4. Repeated facial expressions like squinting your eyes to keep out smoke or pursing your lips to inhale can cause even more wrinkles.
  5. The skin becomes discoloured or uneven, resulting in a patchy or paler appearance.
  6. Sagging also occurs on the face and the body making you look older than your years. Smoking is in fact the number one cause of sagging breasts.
  7. Age spots or dark patches that occur when you get older happen earlier and are more common in smokers.
  8. Hair loss is another common side effect and significantly contributes to baldness, particularly in Asian men.

All is not lost

Now that you know how smoking can wreck your beauty, just quit smoking! Your abused skin is bound to thank you for the oxygen and nutrients it now gets. This could be the beginning of the process towards recovery.

A good dermatologist can help you with chemical peels for mild discolouration and wrinkles along with topical retinoid therapy. Resurfacing lasers are highly effective for deeper wrinkles, sagging and discolouration resulting in younger and fresher skin. Finally, fillers and Botox will help erase those resistant furrows for a line-free and youthful complexion.

Yoga to the rescue

tongue twister exerciseDanielle Collins, a face yoga expert and founder of The Danielle Collins Face Yoga Method also urges people to quit smoking. She says, 'Smoking can dehydrate the skin, affect circulation and detoxification causing a dull skin tone. It can also contribute to muscle breakdown as well as breakdown of collagen causing lines and wrinkles.' Here's one of the exercises from her face yoga method that smokers can try.

Tongue twister exercise: Trace the tongue around the inside of the lips three times one way and three times the other way. This will strengthen the muscle surrounding the mouth thereby smoothing fine lines around that area.

So kick the butt and adopt a healthy lifestyle free of cigarettes and its ill effects.

Read more about causes, symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

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