Smokers Face

In 1985, a Dr Douglas Model added the term "smoker’s face" to the medical dictionary after conducting a study (published in the British Medical Journal) where he found he was able to identify smokers (who had smoked for ten years or more) by their facial features alone. The distinctive characteristics of a smoker’s face which tend to make people look older than they are were called "smoker’s face" and were present in roughly half of the smokers he surveyed, irrespective of the patient’s age, social class, exposure to sunlight, recent change in weight and estimated lifetime consumption of cigarettes.

Smoking cigarettes reduces the efficiency with which the skin can regenerate itself – smoking causes the constriction (narrowing) of the blood vessels at the top layers of the skin which in turn reduces blood supply (to the skin). It is the reduced blood supply which causes a reduction in the availability of oxygen (which is necessary for all living cells) and the removal of waste products, dead cell fragments etc… which provide the necessary environment for regeneration.

Cigarette smoking causes the blood vessels at the top layers of the skin to constrict and so reducing the oxygen level in the blood there. This thickens the blood and reduces the levels of collagen in the skin (it is actually because of this that smoking is also associated with slow or incomplete healing of wounds).

In fact, smoking a single cigarette can produce blood vessels in the skin to constrict for up to 90 minutes. One study suggests that blood flow in the thumb decreases about 24% after smoking one cigarette and by 29% after two cigarettes. Another study suggested that digital (finger) blood flow fell by an average of 42% after smoking one cigarette. A further study found that smoking for 10 minutes decreases tissue oxygen tension for almost an hour and concluded that the typical packet-a-day smoker would remain hypoxic for most of each day. (Smith and Fenske, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatol)