Why Smoking is Ruining Your Appearance

It is no secret that if you smoke cigarettes, it takes a terrible toll on your body. Not only does smoking gradually destroy your throat, lungs and your other internal organs, but smoking also causes terrible damage to your teeth, skin, hair, eyes and facial structure. In some cases, the damage caused by prolonged smoking is not reversible. There are no scientific ways to reverse the effects of ageing, but there is one proven way that you can speed up the ageing process, and that is to kick your addiction.

What’s Hidden Inside a Cigarette

What the tobacco companies will not tell you is that one cigarette contains over 600 additional ingredients other than the well-known ingredients of nicotine and carbon monoxide. They also won’t tell you that the smoke from one cigarette produces over 7,000 chemical reactions. Scientists at Mount Sinai School of Medicine explain that when the ingredients contained in one cigarette burn, they create a chemical reaction that forms other chemicals that only add to the harmful of effects of cigarette smoke. Some of the hidden ingredients include arsenic, formaldehyde, cadmium, and hexamine. Cadmium is usually found in car batteries and hexamine is found in barbeque lighters.  

How Smoking Physically Changes Your Appearance

Other than causing lung cancer, heart disease, diabetes and reducing your lung capacity, smoking devastates your physical appearance. Obviously, prolonged smoking causes the most damage to your physical appearance. However, some of the damage caused by smoking can immediately have an impact on your appearance. Here are some of the ways cigarette smoke can dramatically change the way you look in both the short and long term.

Wrinkles and Premature Ageing

If looking young is important to you, then you may want to consider putting down that cigarette before you light up. Cigarette smoke limits the blood supply to the skin tissue in your face, which helps keep people looking supple and healthy. Smoking cigarettes also limits the amount of oxygen in your blood, which leads to very acute wrinkles on your face and body.

Profound Scarring

Smokers are at a higher risk of developing scars that are redder and deeper than that of non-smokers. The reason for this is the nicotine in cigarettes narrows blood cells by limiting oxygen to those blood cells, causing the healing process to last longer on any wound you suffer. The result is a nasty scar that you have to live with the rest of your life. This type of scarring can occur even if you’ve smoked for less than six months.

Yellow Skin, Fingers and Teeth

Your teeth can turn at least three shades of yellow after just two weeks of smoking. Imagine the damage if you’ve been a life-long smoker. The nicotine in cigarettes is notorious for turning your fingers, the whites of your eyes and your fingernails yellow.

Your Luscious Locks

If you take great pride in your hair as many do, you can say goodbye to that thick, beautiful and shiny mane that once made you so proud, if you smoke of course. Cigarette smoke causes severe damage to your hair follicles, and the chemicals in cigarettes release free radicals that damage the cells in those follicles. What is even worse is that once the damage is done, it is permanent.

If you want to maintain that youthful glow and stop smoking before it gets out of hand, or you’ve been a lifelong smoker who wants to regain some semblance of your past appearance, take up an alternative (as quitting cold turkey is almost impossible for many). One option is vaping, which is the process of inhaling water vapor through a personal vaporizer, also known as an e-cigarette. Beginners can purchase e-cigarette starter kits which will provide a smokeless way to help you quit smoking. They’re tobacco free and sometimes they are nicotine free.

Whether you smoke from time to time or religiously, and whether you’ve been doing it for weeks or for years, it will impact your health and appearance in more ways than one. It is an addiction, so taking yourself away from it will be hard, but there is help available. Whether you take up an alternative like e-cigarettes or find your own method to quit, the change will be worthwhile.

Alicia Joy