Using mobile devices could give you 'smartphone face' with sagging complexion

Wednesday, May 23, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: smartphone, face, complexion

(NaturalNews) Spending too much time staring at your mobile phone, reading from your "tablet" mobile device, or working on your laptop could cause you to develop "smartphone face," a condition that some medical experts say is becoming increasingly more prevalent in the digital age. A recent report in the U.K.'s Daily Mail explains that more people than ever are now having their skin tightened and chins tucked in order to fix the sag caused by using too much technology.

Though it cannot be definitively proven that smart phones and tablet devices are solely to blame, saggy jowls, double chins, and "marionette lines" often develop from the angles at which people use their trendy new mobile devices. Leaning your head to hold your mobile phone in between your face and shoulder, for instance, is believed to cause facial skin and muscle to lose its elasticity more quickly than normal.

As a result, the number of people who now seek treatment or surgery for such conditions outpaces the number seeking breast augmentations, Botox injections, and liposuction surgeries combined. And it is this rapid rise in the facial reconstruction category that aesthetic experts have linked directly to mobile device usage, as no other modern habit tends to stretch or otherwise damage facial skin and muscle tissue as much as this one.

"If you sit for hours with your head bent slightly forward, staring at your iPhone or laptop screen, you may shorten the neck muscles and increase the gravitational pull on the jowl area, leading to a drooping jawline," said Dr. Mervyn Patterson from the Woodford Medical Group to the Evening Standard.

Seeing your own face on video chat software could make you more likely to consider facial surgery

Besides the physical damage that may be caused by excessive mobile device usage, the popularity of video chat programs like Apple's "FaceTime" application, as well as other digital communication programs that allow people to see their own faces, is also believed to be a culprit. Many individuals that use these programs become more self-conscious of their own appearances, which leads them to make permanent, surgical changes.

"Over the past 18 months to two years we've seen a steady increase in the number of those option for the procedure (chin implants), but we're around three years behind the U.S. so we expect a similar pattern to gradually emerge," said a spokesperson from Transform, a U.K.-based cosmetic surgery provider, to the Daily Mail.

The situation is only expected to worsen, as up to 80 percent of the U.K. workforce could be working remotely from laptop computers by 2015, according to a 2006 Health and Safety Executive Horizon Scanning report. This would be up from only about eight percent of the U.K. workforce today (http://www.hse.gov.uk/horizons/downloads/precwrkreport.pdf).

Sources for this article include:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://blogs.ajc.com