“Smoking’s impact on wrinkling, skin health and skin resiliency was first observed more than 30 years ago. But science now has a better understanding of just what it is about the impact of tobacco’s toxic chemicals, on multiple levels, that produces what has been dubbed “the smoker’s face.”
Dr. Anatoli Freiman, of the division of dermatology at the University of Toronto, authored a 2006 review of all the research evidence of tobacco’s effects on skin, which are largely due to the impact of harmful chemicals in smoke such as nicotine, carbon monoxide, tar, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, mercury, lead and cadmium. Together, these chemicals reduce blood flow to the skin, reduce circulating oxygen, attack the skin’s architecture and cause the breakdown of supportive structures such as collagen and elastin (the fibres that give skin its stretch).
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