By Hannah Sivak, PhD
Biochemist
Senior Scientist Skin Actives Scientific LLC

Smoking is bad for your skin
...but you already know that.  The point of this guide is, what can you do about it?

Cigarette skin
“Cigarette skin” is characterized by puffiness, increased facial wrinkling, red-orange complexion and sallowness.

The skin of smokers ages prematurily. Eventually, smoking will lead to irregularly thickened skin resulting from broken elastic fibers (smoking increases the activity of matrix proteinases, enzymes that break down collagen and other proteins). Superficially, the skin of smokers resembles sun damaged skin, but anatomical studies reveal that the damage goes deeper in the skin, as far as the dermis.

Smoking decreases vitamin A and hydration. Blood vessels that provide nutrition and oxygen to the dermis deteriorate, blood flow to the skin decreases and so does skin oxygenation. Maybe for this reason, smokers’ skin heals more slowly, a problem that goes further than the face and affects post-surgery healing. Smoking increases the incidence of pre-cancerous skin lesions and of squamous cell carcinoma on lips and oral mucosa.  Hair is also affected and turns gray early.

What can be done?

If you are planning to have cosmetic or any other type of surgery, try to stop smoking for at least a couple of weeks before the procedure, your skin will heal faster if given a few days "holidays" from smoking.

For those of you that continue to smoke, you need to try to compensate the increased concentration of strong oxidants in your skin by using both hydrophilic (water loving) and lipophilic antioxidants. You will find both of these types in Skin Actives Scientific ELS (every lipid serum) and CHAS (complete hydrophilic antioxidant serum).

For former and present smokers, use every tool at your disposal to reverse the clock: SAS sells anti-age and eye creams that can do just that. Our anti-age cream contains important actives like Coenzyme Q10 (for mitochondria damaged by smoke) and resveratrol (anti-cancer, anti-age). Liquid rainbow will provide protection, nutrition and antioxidants to the lips, which is the part of smoker's faces that ages the fastest.

The Bright-I cream will help with the eye area, helping with puffy eyes and dark under-eye circles.

For damage to blood vessels: resveratrol, grape seed proanthocyanidins, in our capillary health cream.

For wrinkled lips: liquid rainbow with antiOx booster

Once that you start treatment with SAS anti-age cream, you can use the alpha/beta exfoliator to improve your skin faster, but don't forget that nutrition is even more imporatant once you start exfoliation, and especially for smokers.

Smokers' hair

The free radicals that affect the skin will also affect the hair, which will gray prematurely. Help your hair with our hair serum, it will decrease damage done by oxidants.