this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Does nicotine specifically cause skin damage? Obviously smoking tobacco does, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily the nicotine component that causes the skin damage. There’s thousands of chemicals in tobacco beyond nicotine and I haven’t yet seen a study that shows that nicotine in isolation impacts skin condition.
inhaling carcinogenic smoke to get nicotine would age you more, but nicotine itself also has adverse effects by constricting blood vessels, which would affect how much oxygen and nutrients are able to reach the dermal layer. this would also affect hair follicles.
here's some decent sources for more reading:
E-cigarettes containing nicotine cause blood clotting and make small blood vessels less adaptable
NIH-funded studies show damaging effects of vaping, smoking on blood vessels
it's certainly possible that the ecigarettes used in the testing here may have altered the results, but it's not looking pretty.
Thanks four the sources. So there’s evidence that nicotine impacts blood vessels, but not yet that that impacts skin condition? That makes sense, nicotine use in isolation hasn’t been around all that long yet. As I mentioned, that specific link doesn’t appear to have been studied yet to the best of my knowledge, but I don’t have access to journalistic databases that I used to.
well, not quite, but you have the gist.
nicotine patches and gum have been around for quite awhile, and the blood vessel constriction is a fact, and therefore, it will affect skin/hair health.
it's just to what degree. clearly, it's more with analog cigarettes where you're sucking on literal smoke.
I assume you mean less and yeah, that would make sense on the face of it. It just seems as though there’s no empirical evidence that nicotine specifically causes skin damage - only evidence that it causes blood vessel constriction. Do you have a source that shows a causal relationship from constricting blood vessels to poor skin health? That again would make sense to me, but I just don’t like to base my positions on assumptions - I’m a raw data sort of person.
There’s definitely no world where nicotine is harmless - it causes very clear harms beyond simple addiction that we’ve known for some time - but it’s important to be accurate around how much safer nicotine is in its other forms, particularly as you mentioned that it’s a necessary medicinal quit-smoking aid compound.
If vaping nicotine is the equivalent of five minutes of sun exposure per day without sunscreen, that’s a tolerable risk. If it causes anywhere near 50% of the damage that cigarettes cause, that’s a serious issue.
right.
and yea, vasoconstriction is vasoconstriction and we know nicotine (among other stimulants) causes it, and therefore, it's going to reduce blood flow to the skin. reduced blood flow = less oxygen/nutrients. over time, this can slow down the healing/regeneration process of the skin, which would lead to a more aged appearance. this also effects hair follicles.
there's not much else to prove here; it's cause and effect.