Living in big cities ages the skin by 10 years

Life in big cities, in Bulgaria there are those with a population of over 100 thousand people, contributes to the acceleration of skin aging by 10 years. The results of the research were presented by the company Procter & Gamble.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that life in rural areas is much more beneficial for human skin. And this difference is impressive – the skin of urban women ages much faster than that of their peers from villages and small provincial towns.

The scientists invited 200 women aged 30 to 45 to participate in the study. One half of the volunteers lived in big cities, and the other in the villages.

All the women led roughly the same lifestyles and were exposed to comparable amounts of UV radiation. But despite this, it turned out that the skin aged faster among the ladies from the cities.

One of the participants in the study, 46-year-old Elizabeth Hunt, a mother of 3 children, reported that she moved to live in the countryside precisely to preserve her health and youth.

She and her husband had their own land where they grew all the fruit and vegetables they needed and tried not to buy anything from supermarkets. And they also spent a lot of time outdoors.

Dermatologist Stephanie Williams notes that one of her patients lived in the city and at the end of the day had a habit of cleaning the dirt from her face – “After cleaning, the white gauze turned completely gray.

You can see all the dirt and grime of the city on your skin. She is slim and tight, but her skin is 10 years older than the chronological age”.

This is due to the fact that polluted air causes inflammation, destroys the skin’s protective mechanisms, damages the collagen that maintains its elasticity and, as a consequence, accelerates the formation of wrinkles and aging.

Within this study, it was also found that in rural women, skin aging is caused to the greatest extent by exposure to sunlight.

It is quite possible that this is related to improper skin care, because women in the villages are not in the habit of using special protective products. But even so, living in the center of the big city proved to be more harmful than exposure to sunlight.

If it was previously believed that the particles of urban dirt cannot penetrate the skin and remain on its surface, the present study has shown that this is not the case.

And ordinary care, including cleaning, hydration and proper nutrition is completely insufficient.
In the big cities in Bulgaria, the air is most polluted mainly in Sofia and Plovdiv, and even our second largest city was declared in 2013 for the city with the dirtiest air in the entire European Union.

During the past year 2014, the situation changed, most likely due to the heavy rainfall during most of the year.

The main source of pollution in big cities in our country are cars, which in recent years in the capital have reached critical levels of 550 per 1,000 population, which causes the deterioration of air quality in big cities in the future.

In Bulgaria, additional pollution from cars is also created due to the fact that the majority of them are recycled and are over 5 years old and their systems for catalyzing harmful gases do not function.