Does smoking affect your appearance? It’s true!

Author: Xiao Dan, Director of the Department of Tobacco Control and Respiratory Disease Prevention and Control, China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Researcher

Reviewer: Tang Qin, Deputy Secretary-General of the Science Popularization Expert Committee of the Chinese Medical Association, Researcher

Does smoking affect your appearance?

You may answer "yes" without hesitation. So how does it affect appearance? I'm afraid many people can only give a vague answer or guess to this question.

Today we're going to show you how smoking affects your appearance. After reading this, you can show off your extensive knowledge the next time someone talks to you about how two people of similar age age age very differently.

01

Smoking and skin aging

In 2010, a review article titled "Research Progress on Smoking and Skin Aging" published in the Journal of Chinese Aesthetic Medicine summarized the mechanisms by which smoking promotes skin aging.

The toxic substances produced during smoking can act directly on the skin on the one hand, and indirectly on the skin by entering the body on the other hand.

With the help of the smoking action, the chemicals produced during tobacco combustion successively stimulate the oral mucosa, nasal mucosa, upper respiratory tract and lung tissue. For example, fat-soluble substances such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons can diffuse freely through the cell membrane and eventually enter the blood circulation; and hydrophilic substances can also enter the blood through gas exchange through the lung-blood barrier after reaching the alveoli. Once entering the blood, these chemicals successively combine with various blood cells, various transport proteins and other components, or directly dissolve in the blood, and circulate through the blood to various tissues and organs of the body, including the skin.

Smoking causes skin ischemia, changes in skin tissue collagen content, upregulation of matrix metalloproteinases, inhibition of transforming growth factor β1, and inhibition of estrogen synthesis, thereby promoting skin aging.

How smoking causes skin aging[1]

For postmenopausal women, smokers are more likely to have wrinkles on their faces, and the use of estrogen replacement therapy does not reduce the risk of wrinkles in smokers.

In addition, the repeated inhalation action during smoking can cause the cheeks to sink inward, and the habitual mouth corner movements and long-term subconscious eye deflection caused by smoke stimulation can produce wrinkles, which also aggravates the degree of skin aging to a certain extent.

Smoking accelerates skin aging, which can be avoided by quitting tobacco. It should be noted that normal skin aging that occurs with age is a natural physiological change, and there is no need to develop appearance anxiety or age anxiety.

Having talked about the effects of smoking on facial skin, we will keep the next topic a secret for now.

But if you are careful enough, you must have noticed that the expression used in the previous paragraph is "facial skin" instead of "skin".

Why is this? Because in the human head and face skin, in addition to the facial skin, there is also the head skin which accounts for two-thirds of the area, that is, our scalp.

It is not difficult to infer that smoking is harmful to the skin of the head from the harm it causes to the facial skin. The harm to the scalp will fall on the hair rooted in the scalp. Smoking and hair loss is our next topic.

02

Smoking and hair loss

The review "Research Progress on the Effect of Smoking on the Pathogenesis of Skin Diseases" pointed out that smoking and ultraviolet radiation are the main exogenous factors causing hair loss. Cross-sectional surveys showed that androgenic alopecia is significantly correlated with smoking status, and the history of early onset increases in a dose-dependent manner with the amount of smoking.

Smoking-induced oxidative stress and imbalance of the antioxidant system may be one of the main mechanisms causing hair loss. On the one hand, oxidative stress can inhibit the growth of hair follicle keratinocytes; on the other hand, the reactive oxygen species produced by tobacco smoke extracts through endogenous and exogenous pathways can cause the degeneration phase of the hair cycle to start earlier.

Smoking has two effects, and your hair is in a precarious situation.

Author's drawing

03

Smoking and skin damage

Whether it is reflected in the face or the volume of hair, the impact on appearance is the result of smoking harming the skin. What is more worthy of attention than the change in appearance is the harm of smoking to skin health.

A large number of studies have shown that smoking is associated with a series of skin damages such as scar formation, allergic dermatitis, palmoplantar pustulosis, basal cell carcinoma, melanoma, acne, hair loss, and psoriasis.

A study released by the University of Leeds in the UK in 2019 showed that smoking may affect the body's immune system's ability to fight melanoma, a major skin cancer. Compared with melanoma patients who never smoke, the survival rate of melanoma patients with a long history of smoking is significantly reduced.

Currently, most studies have identified smoking as an independent risk factor for squamous cell carcinoma. Smoking is associated with an increased risk of squamous cell carcinoma of the penis, vulva, cervix, anus, oral cavity, and head and neck.

That’s all for today’s three topics. Next time you see your beauty-conscious friend smoking, you can try using these arguments to persuade him to quit.

For the sake of appearance and health, quit smoking scientifically. I hope everyone can get rid of the smoke in front of them and live a healthy, light and vigorous life!

References

Shi Liqing, Chen Min. Research progress on the effect of smoking on the incidence of skin diseases. Chinese Journal of Leprosy and Skin Diseases, 2021, 37(01): 56-59.