By now, most people know that smoking tobacco significantly affects their health and their body. If you’ve been a smoker for a while, it is likely that your fingers, nails, teeth, and even hair have been affected by your habit.
If smoking has affected your body and appearance, don’t fret and give yourself more skin problems! There’s still hope for your skin if you quit now.
What Effects Does Smoking Tobacco Have on Your Skin?
The effects that smoking has on the inside of your body are well known. Even packs of cigarettes have warnings on them that tell you that they are harmful to the inside of your body, often in graphic detail.
Cigarette smoking exposes your skin to over 4,000 chemicals that can damage your skin. Cyanide and formaldehyde are just two of the chemicals that are being inhaled and absorbed by the skin on your face. The combination of these chemicals can cause discoloration where the smoke exposure is highest, like the fingers.
However, the signs of skin damage that smokers wear on their skin, especially on their faces, clearly show that there is a connection between skin damage and smoking. The external damage and the internal damage are all connected.
Cigarette smoking is a vasoconstrictor, which means that it causes a constriction of blood vessels, reducing blood flow or stopping it completely. This decreased supply of oxygen and nutrients that your blood brings to your skin causes premature damage.
Elastin and collagen, which provide elasticity to your skin and keeps skin firm and flexible, are destroyed by smoking. This premature damage can lead to skin sagging around the neck and wrinkling on the face, especially the area around the eyes and mouth.
How Does Quitting Smoking Benefit my Face?
Regardless of how long someone has been smoking, quitting will have a positive impact on their skin and their overall health. Just in case you need some more reasons to get you to quit those cancer sticks, here are some ways that quitting will benefit your face:
Increased Circulation
Within two to twelve weeks after quitting smoking, your blood circulation will improve. This means that your daily physical activities be easier for you, and it also means that you are lowering your risk for a heart attack.
This increased blood circulation also means that the rate at which your skin repairs itself will increase. Since the rate of skin cell turnover will increase, your wrinkles will be reduced. Also, the rate at which your skin heals from scars and blemishes will be improved as well.
Related: The Benefits of Chemical Peels on the Body
Look Younger
Smoking hinders your body from being able to soak in nutrients that are important for health such as calcium and vitamin C. Once you quit, your body will absorb vitamin C normally again, and that will raise your collagen production since vitamin C is an important component of that process.
This will make your skin more firm since collagen is an integral part of what gives your skin its structure. Collagen helps to keep skin looking youthful by minimizing any wrinkles and also reducing sagging of the skin.
It will take a few months for your vitamin C production to stimulate your collagen production to normal levels again. There’s a good chance that you’ll see shallow wrinkles on your skin repair themselves within this time frame.
Need a cleanser that will support your skin healing from past tobacco use? Try our Anti-Aging Resurfacing Cleanser
Show Your True Colors
One of the first noticeable signs of damage to your skin from smoking is an unhealthy-looking complexion. Smoking will begin to shut down the blood vessels in the skin and will take away the healthy coloration. This will leave the skin looking gray and sickly.
Nobody wants to have zombie skin, but don’t worry! Once you quit smoking, the color returns pretty quickly and will continue to improve as your circulation opens up again. For those that have been long-time smokers, the improvement will take more time.
Related: How to Get rid of Hyperpigmentation with Real Results
Smoker’s Lines
Smoker’s lines are the wrinkles that appear around a smoker’s lips due to the way that smokers have to pucker their lips to take a drag off their cigarette.
As the skin ages, it loses its elasticity, and these lines become more prominent, giving a person a permanent expression of being a smoker. The lines can then be made worse by other habits such as drinking from a straw, sucking on candy, or even talking.
Learn: Skin Laxity: Causes &Treatment Guide
How Long Will it Take for Me to See the Benefits?
The time it takes for your skin to improve after quitting smoking depends on several factors, including the number of years you smoked, the type of tobacco you smoked, and your overall health prior to quitting. Quitting smoking can have immediate benefits to the appearance of your skin, but the full extent of improvement may take several weeks or months to be seen.
Within a month after quitting, you’ll notice some pretty significant changes to the health of your skin. Your skin will start to return to its regular hue and get rid of that sickly pallid complexion that smokers develop. You may also begin to notice your skin start to develop a healthy glow due to the return of nutrients and oxygen to your skin.
Further down the line, within a year, you’ll start noticing that your fine lines and wrinkles have started improving. You may also notice that any discoloration from smoking has started to fade.
Trying to give your skin the best chance of recovering from wrinkles caused by smoking? Add our Hydra-Repair Wrinkle Cream to your daily skin routine!
What You Can Do Right Now
The most important thing you can do right this moment is to stop smoking. The earlier you quit, the less damage there is to repair, so make sure you make your first step the right one.
The next step to take is to make sure you establish a solid skin care regimen to help reverse the skin damage that your past smoking has caused. Make sure your daily routine involves a cleanser, moisturizer, and sunscreen with an SPF of 30 to give your chance the best shot at recovering.