Smoking Damages Your Face's Skin: Face Lifts Can Repair It

Smoking is a hard habit to break and it affects your health in a number of negative ways. One of the most prominent of these is the way it ages your skin prematurely. This damage is often so severe in the face that it can only be fixed by a face lift. Here is what you need to know about this topic.

How Smoking Transforms Your Face

When you smoke, you are doing serious damage to the skin in your face. This is especially true of the area around your mouth, where wrinkles will likely form first. The problems caused by smoking includes decreased elasticity of your skin, narrower blood vessels which can cause a loss of collagen, decreased levels of vitamin A, poor scar healing, and even burns on your face from the heat of the cigarette.

All of these changes can quickly turn the face on your skin into an inert and difficult mass that makes you look much older. Getting a face lift can help a lot here, but you need to get any cigarette burns on your face repaired first to avoid extra scarring during the face lift process.

Repairing Direct Cigarette Burns

As a smoker, there's a chance you've accidentally burned yourself a few times on the face. The intense heat of a cigarette can cause a quick scar that may linger for years. This is especially true if you continue to smoke and your body can't repair the skin as efficiently as it could otherwise. Often, these scars will eventually fade, but more serious ones may need surgery.

You may need a small skin graft or microsurgery to help repair the damage caused by the burn, though this is usually only done in severe cases. Your plastic surgeon will give you advice on this procedure and help you decide if it is necessary. One thing that will definitely be necessary, though, is quitting smoking before the procedure.

Quitting Smoking Before Your Face Lift

Plastic surgery and smoking don't go together well because smoking causes blood circulation problems to your face that make surgery more difficult and dangerous. It also makes it necessary to use more pain medication and anesthesia and decreases the speed of your healing, potentially cutting you off from work for months at a time.

Obviously, quitting smoking is something most people want to do anyway, but you can't just cut yourself off the day before your surgery. It's best to stop at least two weeks or so before your surgery. This may put you on edge, but it helps your face recovery a bit from the negative effects of smoking.

While a face lift might not make you look exactly the same as you used to before you started smoking, it can help restore some luster to your skin and help you look years younger. That's what makes it a technique worth trying. For more information, visit sites like http://www.myplasticsurgerygroup.com. 

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