How your smartphone is ageing your skin

Love gadgets? The downside is, they come with a price – ageing your skin. If you are hooked to your smartphone or tablet for most part of the day, chances are, you are suffering from a phenomenon called ‘smartphone face’.  Interestingly, it has nothing to do with the radiation of the gadget. It is one’s posture that gets affected. 

Essentially, with the advent of smartphones, people are keeping their heads bent down and forward for hours and hours to look at their phones and tablets. This causes neck muscles to be shortened, thereby increasing the gravitational pull on the skin. Ultimately this results in sagging skin, double chins, marionette lines (those vertical lines from your lips to your chin) and loose jowls.Frequent use of smartphones, tablets and laptops may bring out early signs of ageing like etched lines, wrinkles, double chins and loose skin in a person. He called this ‘tech neck’ as it happens when people look down at their laptops or phones too often and it gives them the neck of a much older person.Apart from affecting your posture, research also suggests that prolonged use of mobile phones causes skin allergies. Phones which have nickel and cobalt in their body can cause what is known as cellphone dermatitis. These are mostly phones which have a metallic sheen on them. It can react with the skin and cause an itchy rash. The best way to avoid this is to use a phone cover, talk on hands-free mode and keep the conversations short so that the skin isn’t in contact with the phone for too long.

Tips to treat smartphone face:

Call it tech neck or smartphone face, the truth is, several of us are suffering from it. Here are some ways to treat it. Firstly, you need to improve your posture if you want to prevent further damage. Don’t constantly keep your head down. Instead, hold your smartphone or tablet up to look at it so your chin stays parallel to the ground. Try and allocate some time away from your phone or tablet so that you can give your neck a bit of a rest.

Face yoga:

Certain face yoga exercises can also help in reducing the damage done by your gadgets. If double chin is what is bothering you, you can try doing ‘kiss the sky’ exercise recommended by leading face yoga expert Danielle Collins. To do this, tilt your head back and make a kissing sound and action towards the ceiling. Do this twice a day for a minute each time to get rid of your double chin.

If neck lines are bothering you, you can try an exercise called ‘giraffe’ that can help tone and lift the neck area. Here’s how to do the pose:

Looking straight ahead place your finger tips on the top of your neck and lightly stroke the skin down as you tilt your head back. Bring your head back down and repeat it twice more. Then jut your lower lip out as far as possible, place your fingers on your collarbone and point your chin upwards pulling the corners of your mouth down. Hold for 4 deep breaths. Relax, repeat.