Smokers have more wrinkles in their skin. Smokers tend to have particularly bad wrinkles around the mouth and eyes.
just the facts
smokers in their forties have as many wrinkles as nonsmokers in their sixties do. (1)
smoking affects the development of wrinkles even among people in their twenties and thirties. (2)
Sources 1. Burke KE. Facial wrinkles: prevention and nonsurgical correction. Postgraduate Medicine 1990;88:207-228. 2. Koh JS, Kang H, Choi SW, Kim HO. Cigarette smoking associated with premature facial wrinkling: image analysis of facial skin replicas. International Journal of Dermatology 2002;41:21-27.
explanation
If you were to line up 10 smokers your parents' age on one side of a room and 10 nonsmokers of the same age on the other side, you would notice a big difference between them. The smokers would look much older than the nonsmokers. The reason? Smokers have more wrinkles in their skin. In fact, smokers in their forties have as many wrinkles as nonsmokers in their sixties do. (1)
Smokers tend to have particularly bad wrinkles around the mouth and eyes. You can see the wrinkles around the mouth really easily in women who wear lipstick. The lipstick bleeds into the wrinkles, making funny-looking jagged edges.
You may think of wrinkles as an old person's problem, but they start to develop when you're young, even though they don't become obvious until you reach middle age. By using special methods to examine the skin, scientists have found that smoking affects the development of wrinkles even among people in their twenties and thirties. (2) Scientists have also learned that smoking may cause more wrinkles in women than it does in men.
