Is it true smoking leads to premature aging?
One of the most interesting responses that I get from people who want to quit smoking, when I tell them, if you quit smoking now, you will no longer have the advanced changes to your skin with wrinkling, due to the oxygen levels being diminished from carbon monoxide in your skin and not being able to fight off all of the damage of the sun. The constriction to your blood vessels means that not much oxygen that you even have is being carried to fight off all the free radical changes that occur with sun exposure, and because of the fact that skin cancer itself is higher in smokers. Not even just wrinkling but damage to your skin, in general, is a natural consequence of smoking. When they take pictures - and I show this to my smokers - of someone who has never smoked, and then share a picture of someone who has been a lifetime smoker, you will often guess that those people have 10, 15 or 20 years difference in age when actually they are the same age. Dermatologic research has shown unequivocally that cigarette smoking, because of the physiology of what it does to someone's skin - depriving it of oxygen, depriving it of its vascular supply - prematurely ages skin. When you stop smoking, that premature aging ends at that point. With good cleaning and good care and protection from the sun, it shouldn't continue to progress at that same rate to advanced wrinkling and damage to the skin from radiation from the sun.
