How Cigarettes Affect Your Appearence

Image from NBC News

I didn't smoke for that long before I had to quit, thankfully. I started smoking way before I should have, probably when I was about fifteen or sixteen years old, and I quit in April. The only reason I quit was because I was pregnant or I would still be smoking, but I still think about it a lot more than I should which people told me wouldn't happen anymore after a month. They lied! So I've had to look for other sources of motivation to stay quit after I have the little because I like to tell my boyfriend, family, and friends that I'll only buy the one pack and once it's gone I'll be done. One of those sources of motivation has been constantly Googling the phrase "affect of cigarettes on appearance," which I've been doing a lot the last few weeks.

If you do what I did you'll find a lot of things like pictures of twins, one that smoked and one that didn't, and the one who did smoke generally looks a lot older than the one who didn't smoke. I personally am not a fan of wrinkles, though it isn't something I really have to worry about at my age. However, nicotine really speeds up the process of getting wrinkles and generally makes your skin look like crap. It dulls the skin, it can cause breakouts, and it can cause wrinkles like I've already said. Why is that? Because smoking actually keeps your skin from getting oxygen and other stuff that it really needs to look as good as it can. I don't want to look like I'm thirty-five when I hit twenty-five, because at the rate I was going that would definitely happen. I was smoking a pack a day or more if I was having a really crappy day. Yes, I know that was a huge waste of money.

Then there's the affect is has on your teeth! As we all know tobacco yellows teeth, fingers, nails, whatever else basically, but it can also do a lot more to your teeth than make them look ugly. It can also literally make them rot and fall out. I know we've all seen someone who has brown spots on their teeth from smoking, and even if you do that's not as bad as it gets so don't think just because you have something like that it isn't going to get any worse! Your teeth could literally fall out and let's be honest, brown teeth are probably preferable to no teeth at all. Plus there's always whitening options if you're not too far in. Thankfully I wasn't and my teeth are getting semi-better.

What didn't I know smoking could cause? Psoriasis! Now of course having psoriasis isn't the end of the world and it can come about even if you don't smoke, but if there's a possibility you could avoid it why wouldn't you want to? If you're wondering what psoriasis is it's extremely dry patches of skin that are scaly and can be discolored as well. They're uncomfortable and I imagine they'd make someone very insecure, but I can't really speak for that because I've been lucky enough to avoid that in my life so far. Also, I had no idea smoking could cause sagging skin, saggy arms, and saggy breasts. This is because the skin loses a lot of elasticity while you're a smoker and that also makes it easier to get stretch marks. Eek! Hopefully that won't be a problem in my pregnancy because of my smoking.

So if cancer, the smell, or the money weren't good enough reasons for you to quit smoking for good you should try to torture yourself with articles like I do. A good place to start would be this WebMD article about how smoking can change your appearance and some health threats in smoking you may not have heard about. You can also Google search for things like I did and keep in mind the things that I read that bothered me. I feel like I've done so much research on it that I'm nearly an expert, only not actually. It may be an ugly truth, but I'm glad I shared it with you guys.