Estrogen, Smoking and the Skin
Smokers have bad skin. That is something that you can observe if you know one. You don’t really need to have a scientific proof of the fact - but some details about how this occurs has recently come to light and it makes interesting reading.
Although it has been in the public domain for two years now I have only just picked up on some interesting information in a paper published in the IFSCC magazine. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone in possession of a menstrual cycle that there is an effect of the time of the month on the condition of the skin. This has now been quantified by some dutch workers who were able to work out an equation showing that there is a direct relationship between estrogen levels and the level of moisturisation of the skin.
In the paper itself they produce a graph plotting moisturisation level against estrogen level showing the link beyond all doubt. When we look at the condition of someone’s skin I find it amazing to think that we are actually looking at the effect of the level of sex hormones they possess.
Smoking reduces the level of estrogen so it will also lead to your skin being drier than it would otherwise be. There are quite a lot of reasons not to smoke, and I guess that dry skin is not the most serious. But it is another reason to give up smoking.
Reference
Evidence for the Existence of a Body-Brain Connection for Skin Moisturisation IFSCC Magazine vol 10, no 3 2007
