I quit smoking about 16 years ago. As a pharmacist it quite didn’t fit in with the healthy lifestyle I was supposed to be promoting and certainly didn’t help my cause when offering advice on nicotine patches and gum. In my head, trying to look cool like James Dean with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of my mouth was going hideously wrong.
The cosmetic advantages of stopping smoking is that your skin tone and complexion improves, acne breakouts are less frequent and your ageing process slows back down to a natural pace. Skin elasticity is improved and firmness is restored… yada yada yada! So I was feeling great, smoke free, exercising and looking after myself. It’s the same story for most people who gave up smoking in time for the millennium… until the advent of camera phones and Facebook.
One of the ageing effects of smoking is that it gives you the classic wrinkled upper and lower lips that long term smokers have caused by drawing smoke through the cigarette. A 78 year olds lips on a 28 year old face. Not cool at all.
Stay with me, I’m leading up to something here.
A quick browse on Google and the stats are over a million selfies taken daily and the average millennial will take over 25,000 selfies in their lifetime. That’s a lot of sucking in your cheeks and pouting for that perfect shot – and those figures don’t include retakes. Duck pouts, sparrow pouts or whatever is the new trend is (I wouldn’t know, I’m not as cool as James Dean) are all leading up to those dreaded Dot Cotton wrinkled smokers lips. Made worse if you actually smoke too.
Amara Spa Crew
Top tip: Anti-ageing eye cream around the lips will help. I like Dermalogica Age Reversal Eye Cream or Environ C-quence Eye Gel are both good. Dermalogica have actually thought about my ponderings and just launched a lip cream to tackle this very problem. Try their new nightly lip treatment, if you can find some. We are selling out fast.
You can come and see me for advice on stopping smoking, but there’s not much I can do about your selfie addiction.
In the grand scheme of things selfies aren’t really as bad as smoking, except for the wrinkly lips thing but then again, last year more people were killed taking selfies than by shark attacks.
Our Health Blogger, Bhavash Padhiar is the founder of Amara Spa, a day spa and leading skincare centre in Fulham, London.
Visit: amaraspa.co.uk
Follow: @AmaraSpa
