Smoking really does make you look older, a twin study confirms

You know smoking doesn’t do any favors for your face - or your lungs, or your heart, or just about any other part of your body, for that matter! – but a new study of twins hints at the ways the habit makes you look older than you really are.

In what is perhaps the best detail of the study, researchers used the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio (the "Largest Annual Gathering of Twins in the World!") to round up the 79 identical pairs they include in the report. A panel of three plastic surgery residents compared the faces of the twins, one of which had been smoking for at least five years longer than the other.

They identified a few major areas of accelerated aging in the faces of the smoking twins: The smokers' upper eyelids drooped while the lower lids sagged, and they had more wrinkles around the mouth. The smokers were also more likely to have jowls, according to the study, which was published today in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

Smoking reduces oxygen to the skin, which also decreases blood circulation, and that can result in weathered, wrinkled, older-looking skin, explains Dr. Bahman Guyuron, a plastic surgeon in Cleveland, Ohio, and the lead author of the study.

100,000 die annualy in Turkey from smoking Publishing an announcement about the "Feb. 9th Anti-Somking Day," the President of the Turkish Green Crescent Prof. M. İhsan Karaman made a call for people to quit smoking. Indicating that cigarette addiction is one of the world's most prominent health threats, Karaman said diseases that smoking causes kill six million people in the world annually, 100,000 of which live in Turkey.

"Smoking effects both individuals and a country's economy negatively. The events in Anti-Smoking Day aim to increase social awareness about the dangers of smoking." he said.

Stating that approximately one out of three adults in the world smoke, Karaman added that cigarettes are the main factor for prominent health problems such as lung cancer and coronary disases as well as respiratory disorders, and it leads to diseases that cause the death of six million people worldwide.

"Cigarettes have more than 4,000 chemical substances that are harmful for our health such as cyanide, ammonia, carbon monoxide, naphthalene, cadmium and acetone. These carcinogenic substances enter our blood circulation through smoking. That's why cigarettes shorten the lifetime by 20-25 years for those who start smoking at an early ages. Moreover, smokers tend to live an unhealthy life during their lifetime." he concluded.

The logic of research like this and others like it is this: If threats of cancer, heart and lung disease, or the dangers of second- and third-hand smoke aren’t enough to get people to stop smoking, or to never start in the first place, then why not try appealing to people’s vanity? (The same tactic has been used in an attempt to warn young people away from tanning.)