How does smoking affect skin?
How does smoking affect skin? Most people know that smoking is bad for your health. It can increase your risk of cancer, cause problems during pregnancy and make you more likely to suffer from a stroke or heart attack. But even before you experience any of these catastrophic health problems, smoking has already made its mark on you. You can see this impact every time you look in the mirror. When you take a puff, you’re causing irreversible damage to your skin. This habit can cause early wrinkles, and it accelerates the overall aging of your skin. After only 10 years of smoking, it’s already possible to see the effects in the faces of young adults [source: Mayo Clinic]. Smoking causes wrinkles by narrowing blood vessels in the outer layers of skin. This causes less blood flow and reduces the amount of oxygen and nutrients that can get to the skin [source: