Taking care of our skin is essential to keep that youthful glow for as long as possible. Skin is sensitive to external and internal factors such as sun damage, and many lifestyle choices can negatively impact our skin. No matter how good your skincare routine is, certain bad habits like smoking will undo any positive effects.

Here’s a look at what smoking and other lifestyle habits can do to your skin.

Smoking

Smoking can cause premature ageing in the skin in a few ways. Firstly, it deprives the skin of oxygen and nutrients, which can cause the skin to develop an uneven colour and makes the skin more susceptible to age spots or dark skin patches, especially when paired with spending a lot of time in the sun.

The chemicals in tobacco smoke can destroy the collagen and elastin in the skin, which helps prevent your skin from wrinkling and sagging. Smokers develop earlier and deeper wrinkles, especially around the mouth, known as ‘smoker’s pucker’, caused by using those muscles excessively while smoking.

Excessive Drinking

It is a well-known fact that alcohol causes dehydration, which is why we end up with hangovers in the morning. But this dehydration can be detrimental to our skin health and cause signs of premature ageing. Dry skin can also lead to those nasty post-drinking breakouts.

You may notice that your skin looks red after a night of drinking. This is because alcohol causes inflammation to bodily tissue, which dilates the blood’s capillaries, causing red skin. If this continues for several years, the redness can actually become permanent.

Unhealthy Diet

There’s a huge link between our skin and our diets. The skin quite literally reflects what we put in our bodies, and providing it with a healthy, balanced, nutritious meal is the best way to keep your skin looking great.

Highly processed foods and refined carbohydrates can cause mild inflammation, aggravating skin problems such as acne. Our diets can also impact how our skin fights the effects of UV rays, which affects the firmness of our skin and can lead to fine lines and wrinkles. Fill your diet with good sources of protein like omega-3 fatty acids and richly coloured fruits and vegetables.

Poor Sleep

We’ve all heard of beauty sleep; well, it’s more than just a saying! Missing out on sleep can impact our skin’s moisture levels, lowering our complexion’s PH level. This imbalance causes dried-out skin. Dark circles are a common side effect of lack of sleep, often occurring due to the increased volume of blood sent to the face to make the body more alert when sleep deprived. This can also lead to an overproduction of oil in the skin, leading to breakouts.

A Bad Skincare Routine

A great skincare routine can do wonders for your skin health, but what about a bad skincare routine? Here are a few things you should never do as part of your skincare routine:

• Leave your makeup on overnight

When you sleep in makeup, it prevents your skin from regenerating overnight. The makeup sinks deep into the pores, causing them to clog and leading to breakouts.

• Over-exfoliate

Exfoliating can be great to remove dead skin cells and reveal fresh skin. But exfoliating too often or with harsh products can cause irritation, redness and inflammation. This leads to your skin becoming dry and flaky, and you may develop an uneven skin tone. Stick to a gentle product and only exfoliate a maximum of once a week.

• Use the wrong products for your skin type

Everyone has a skin type, whether it be dry, oily, normal, combination or sensitive. You should make sure your products are suitable for your skin type; otherwise, you could dry out your already dry skin or over moisture your oily skin, causing more problems.

• Go without SPF

SPF is the most essential component of a skincare routine, as it protects the skin from the sun’s harmful UV rays, which are a significant cause of premature ageing.

Stress

Being too stressed can also contribute to poor skin health – as if we didn’t need another reason to be stressed! Feeling stress can cause your body to release the hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which increase the oil production in your skin glanced, leading to acne breakouts. Stress can also negatively impact your immune system, causing your skin to be more reactive, leading to rashes and redness.

What Can Aesthetic Skin Clinic Do to Help?

So there’s plenty of factors out there that can impact our skin health; fortunately, most of them are entirely within our control. If you want to boost your skin health, consider dropping some of those unhealthy habits and see an instant difference.

However, if you’d like to help your skin along with some skincare treatments, you can visit our skin clinic in Belfast, Guernsey or Jersey. We offer an extensive range of some of the most effective skincare remedies on the market. Let’s take a look at a few of the treatments that we provide.

• Visa Skin Analysis. This professional analysis provides in-depth and accurate data about your skin type, so we are able to provide you with a bespoke skincare routine guaranteed to give results.
• This treatment helps to unclog pores, remove dead skin cells and generally deep clean your skin – leaving you fresh, revitalised, and glowing.
• Incredible quality skincare products. We stock a fantastic range of quality skincare products for you to purchase at any of our clinics including those by Swisscode Serums, Skinceuticals, and Skinstation.

For a full list of the skincare treatments we provide, take a look at out website or contact our friendly team today to learn more about how we can get your skin glowing – we can’t wait to hear from you.