The tobacco plant has been known to humankind for millennia, and it wasn’t long after it was brought to Europe that an entire industry started growing around it. In the latter half of the 19th century, the most prolific form of tobacco smoking known today was devised – the tubular cigarettes we all know today.
As the tobacco industry grew, it started promoting its products in more aggressive ways. It all culminated during the world wars, when cigarettes were an integral part of soldiers’ daily rations, working as a morale booster and spreading the addiction further and further. Fortunately, in the 1950s and 1960s, numerous medical reports confirmed the negative impact tobacco has on human wellbeing and physical health. Since then, due to rising awareness of public opinion, traditional forms of smoking are slowly declining.
For a long time, to give up smoking and improve your skin condition, you had to either get rid of nicotine intake entirely or use cumbersome aids such as nicotine patches, but no longer. Now, there is another option that you can consider – and that is switching to vaping.
Contents
What Is Vaping?
Before we focus on how vaping can help you quit smoking and thus improve the way your skin looks, you need to understand what vaping is.
How Does It Work?
In short, vaping is the process of inhaling a special vapour coming from electronic cigarettes, like the ones that can be found at vapekit or on similar websites. By using energy stored in the vape pen’s battery, special coils are heated up to transform the liquid inside into an aerosol, which can contain varying amounts of nicotine.
Unlike a traditional cigarette, the liquids aren’t made out of processed tobacco but rather a mixture of water, propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin base and nicotine, although nicotine-free liquids are also popular.
What Are Your Device Options?
Vape pens themselves come in numerous shapes, sizes and even types, from minuscule pens to sizeable apparatus featuring dozens of customisable options and capable of producing an impressive vapour cloud. These diverse devices can be generally grouped into two distinct categories: MTL and DTL.
MTL, or mouth to lung, is the more classic group of electronic cigarettes, quite reminiscent of traditional cancer sticks in terms of inhalation. First, you suck the vapour into your mouth, and only then do you allow it into the lungs. This method is much less energy-intensive, and because of that, vapes tend to be more compact. Direct to lung devices, on the other hand, allow you to inhale the aerosol directly into your lungs, resulting in a much bigger cloud when you finally exhale.
Now that you know what vaping is, let’s focus on how smoking tobacco damages your skin.
Smoking Makes Your Fingers and Nails Yellow
Those who have been into smoking for a while can easily tell how many cigarettes a person has had just by looking at their fingers. The discolouration starts quite early, leaving your nails and fingers yellow after less than a decade of tobacco smoking.
Tar is the culprit here, an incredibly toxic substance created while the cigarette burns, staining the colour of the affected tissue. The yellowing can be countered by regular manicures and caring for your hands and nails, but it’s much easier to simply replace cigarettes with much safer vape pens. These don’t create tar at all, leading to no annoying discolouration at all.
Tobacco Can Cause Dry Skin
It’s no secret that nicotine dehydrates your skin. This side effect is even worse for those who use nicotine patches or gums to help them quit smoking because these products deliver a higher dosage of nicotine than an average person would take through a cigarette. That’s why a lot of people who quit smoking experience a sudden change in skin texture and an increased tendency to have dry skin problems.
Vaping, on the other hand, doesn’t have to induce such issues on the skin. Liquids are very varied in their composition, including nicotine amounts. While there are thousands of liquids that offer similar to or even higher levels of nicotine content than traditional cigarettes, there is an equal number of products with little to no nicotine.
As quitting smoking is often connected to the desire to improve your skin health, using liquids with a reduced amount of nicotine will help you achieve both of those goals.
Smoking Can Lead To Skin Cancer
This is probably the most well-known negative effect of tobacco smoking. While there are many factors that lead to cancer, smoking is one of the biggest ones. The chemicals found in tobacco smoke can cause mutations in your skin cells, turning them into cancerous ones and leading to skin cancers such as squamous cell carcinoma. Even though people who quit smoking are still at risk of developing the disease, the probability is much lower than for those who either never tried or failed to quit.
That’s why it’s so important to stop inhaling the carcinogens and quit entirely, or if that’s impossible, switch to an alternative that doesn’t utilise burning as a method of releasing nicotine. Vaping is much safer in this regard, as all your device does is heat up your liquid, never burn it. The moment it starts to burn is the moment you did something wrong.
Conclusion
As you can see, smoking tobacco is inherently dangerous to your physical health. It can actively discolour your fingers and nails, make your skin dry and unattractive and even lead to skin cancer.
As such, it would be ideal to quit entirely. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible for everyone. Some love filling their lungs with nicotine, others like it as a habit and some simply think it looks cool. If you are one of those people, you should consider stopping using tobacco and switching to a much safer vaping alternative.
