Since how we look can and does inspire our purchases from toothpaste to underwear to makeup to bath soap to toe rings, let’s take a good look up close and personal at how tobacco products affect our looks.
Skin
Smoking not only makes your skin get wrinkles but it makes you skin look gray.
Don’t believe me? Research in the past 20 years has consistently shown that cigarette smoking causes skin wrinkling that could make smokers appear less attractive and prematurely old. Check out the little lines around the mouths of women who smoke. Check out the lines around their eyes which come from squinting through the smoke. Check out the bloom on your cheeks that is fading fast. It may take a while but it’s happening to you, too, with each puff you take.
According to a recent United Kingdom medical report, smokers’ skin can be prematurely aged by between 10 to 20 years. How does it do this?
Well, tobacco smoke in the environment is drying to the skin; and since the amount of blood flowing to the skin is decreased as well, the skin is depleted of oxygen and essential nutrients – and getting more dehydrated with each puff. Oxygen helps carry blood to the veins and just under your skin so if oxygen is depleted, your skin loses its rosy color.
Other research has shown that skin aging by smoking may also be caused by the break down of collagen in the skin. Collagen is the protein that maintains skin elasticity. Skin damaged by smoke looks grayish, wrinkled, and gaunt. Smokers in their 40s often have as many facial wrinkles as non-smokers in their 60's.
Now, if you don’t mind your fingers and fingernails or teeth looking yellow or having people back away from your “tobacco breath,” fine. But unless that boy or man you like smokes like a chimney, he will probably lean toward a gal whose breath smells fresh, clean and has a mouth that is sweetly kissable. Isn’t that the purpose of the fruit flavored lip gloss featured on every cosmetic counter?
Smoking and Psoriasis
Compared with non-smokers, smokers have two to three times the risk of getting psoriasis. While psoriasis is not life threatening, but this chronic skin condition can be very uncomfortable and disfiguring. Some studies have found that the risk of the disease increases the longer a person continues to smoke. According to other studies, smoking may cause as many as one quarter of all psoriasis cases and may also contribute to as many as half of the cases of palmoplantar pustulosis, a skin disease involving the hands and feet, that some experts view as a form of psoriasis. Ugh. All this and nicotine addiction as well. Hello?
Smoking and Body Shape
Smoking causes female smokers to store even normal amounts of body fat in an abnormal distribution. Smokers are more likely to store fat around the waist – the Apple shape we all hear is related to heart attacks, diabetes, high blood pressure, gallbladder problems, and cancer of the womb and breast.
Smoking and Harm to Your Body
If you smoke or chew or dip, you are gambling big time. You are gambling you will not get lung cancer, a stroke, a heart attack, cancer of the larynx, mouth, throat and esophagus or some form of cancer of the kidney, bladder, pancreatic and stomach associated with cancer.
Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer of women and smoking causes 82 percent of all lung cancers in women. Lung cancer rates increased by more than 600 percent between the years 1950 and 2003. By 1987, lung cancer had passed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer deaths among women. Here’s an eye opener: women who smoke at the same rate as men get cancer more than men. Women smokers have an increased rate of cervical and vulvar cancer.
Smoking can cause blindness to some women.
Female smokers go through menopause earlier than non smokers. This is a factor in a bone disease called Osteoporosis. Additionally, several research studies have identified smoking is also a risk factor for osteoporosis and bone fracture.
Osteoporosis is a condition in which bones weaken and are more likely to fracture (break). Fractures from osteoporosis can result in pain, disability, and sometimes death. Osteoporosis is a major health threat for an estimated 44 million Americans, 68 percent of whom are women.
Osteoporosis is a “silent” disease: it can progress for many years without symptoms until a fracture occurs. It has been called “a pediatric (childhood) disease with geriatric (old age) consequences,” because building healthy bones in youth helps prevent osteoporosis and fractures later in life. However, it is never too late to adopt new habits for healthy bones.
Smoking and Osteoporosis
Cigarette smoking was first identified as a risk factor for osteoporosis more than 20 years ago. Recent studies have shown a direct relationship between tobacco use and decreased bone density. Analyzing the impact of cigarette smoking on bone health is complicated. It is hard to determine whether a decrease in bone density is due to smoking itself or to other risk factors common among smokers. For example, in many cases smokers are thinner than nonsmokers, tend to drink more alcohol, may be less physically active, and have poor diets. Women who smoke also tend to have an earlier menopause than nonsmokers. These factors place many smokers at an increased risk for osteoporosis apart from their tobacco use.
However, most studies on the effects of smoking suggest that smoking increases the risk of having a fracture. Not all studies have supported these findings, but the evidence is mounting. In other words, the judge is still out on this research, but are we really willing to gamble on a broken hip tomorrow?
Smoking causes 30 percent of all cancer deaths.
Deaths of female celebrities from tobacco-related causes:
Lucille Ball, lung cancer, 69
Bette Davis, actress
Amanda Blake, actress
Betty Grable, actress, lung cancer, 57
Melina Mercouri, actress
Pat Nixon, wife of President Richard Nixon
Lee Remick, actress, kidney and lung cancer,
Gene Tierney, actress, emphysema
Death List Source. David Moyer, MD, author of The Tobacco Reference Guide, UICC Globalink
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