5 Most Common Causes of Wrinkles

If your skin undergoes any damage while you’re young, it springs back quickly because of your skin’s elasticity. Whereas, it loses elasticity with age and becomes thinner and drier, hence making an easy target for wrinkles. These fine lines then deepen to make permanent grooves. To make the case worse, the gravitational pull makes them look droopy and saggy.

Apart from the most prominent factor contributing to aging: your age, many other factors can cause wrinkles. Let’s go through some of them.

Causes of Wrinkles

Sun Exposure 

According to an estimation, people working in sunlight have 90% more chances of getting wrinkles earlier than those working indoors. That’s because the UV light penetrates the middle layer of your skin and breaks down the collagen and elastin fibers. (Collagen provides structure to your skin, and elastin gives flexibility to skin tissues).

Excess exposure to the sun leads to recurrent, abnormal breakdowns of collage and elastin fibers, which makes your skin weak and less flexible. Hence the appearance of wrinkles! However, the severity of wrinkles depends upon the total time your skin was exposed to UV rays.

Smoking

Chain smokers show early signs of aging and look significantly older than non-smokers. That’s because the nicotine in cigarettes constricts your blood vessels, thus limiting the oxygen and blood supply to your skin and other organs. It disturbs the natural repair process of skin cells and emphasizes fine lines and wrinkles.

Furthermore, alcohol consumption also ups the ante by making your skin dehydrated. Dry skin is most likely to undergo the early development and onset of wrinkles.

Menopause 

Research shows that menopause speeds up aging in a woman by 6%. A secondary role of the estrogen hormone is keeping your skin elastic, soft, smooth, and hydrated. And menopause is known for reducing estrogen levels in women, followed by a rapid decline in collagen by 30%. Therefore, when you enter menopause, your skin loses elasticity, becomes dry, and wrinkles become more prominent on your skin.

Repeated Facial Movements

Facial expressions like smiling, frowning, squinting, etc., cause contraction of your facial muscles. Such repeated movements lead to grooves on your skin surface, which appear in the form of laugh lines, wrinkles on your forehead, and underneath the eyes. As your skin loses its ability to bounce back, these lines become permanent.

Free Radicals

Free radicals are the unstable oxygen molecules that are on the hunt to stabilize their missing electron. Researchers found that free radicals produced in the mitochondria (the cell’s powerhouse that supplies nutrients) damage the cell substance required for its normal functioning. This cell damage causes a chain reaction of more free radicals and hence more cell damage. This rabbit hole of finding a missing electron then leads to the rapid aging process, which manifests in the form of wrinkles.

Bottom Line

Wrinkles are an inevitable part of the aging process. However, with a healthy lifestyle (like quitting smoking and alcohol), you can delay the development of wrinkles at a young age and also keep other signs of aging at bay.

If you’ve got something to add, feel free to drop a comment below.