Anti-drinking campaigns often try to speak to the adverse health effects drinking can have. But what about the physical effects alcohol can have? The consequences on your health aren’t enough to appeal to a lot of college students because these effects seem farfetched and hard to imagine. A new phone app is trying to appeal to vanity more than health risks. If you are curious to see an illustration of what your face might look like after ten years of heavy drinking, you can’t pass this up.
Drinking Mirror, recently featured on the Today Show, allows users to upload a picture and see what a decade of keeping up their current drinking habits will do to them. The results illustrate weight gain, red eyes, wrinkles and a red blotchy face.
The app was developed in Scotland to help combat a rise in binge drinking. Binge drinking is defined as five or more drinks in a sitting for men and four or more drinks in one sitting for women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in six Americans binge drink at least four times a month.
Americans aged 18 to 34 are the most likely group to binge drink, making it a top issue on college campuses.
In addition to the adverse health effects, drinking in excess can speed up the overall aging process. The absorption of alcohol has negative effects on the skin, causing dryness and discoloration over time, while continual binge drinking can also cause swollen facial blood vessels and capillaries to burst leaving the skin scattered with permanent markings.
Drinking also causes dehydration, which affects the skin. If drinking in large quantities is a habit that continues for some time, the body adjusts accordingly. Skin that is constantly dry leads to early showing of wrinkles. It also may accelerate the slowing of collagen and elastin production, contributing to skin that appears saggy or loose.
Weight gain is another vanity-related issue that comes along with binge drinking. Alcohol is empty calories, and even just a few drinks can add up. When drinking, it is not difficult to take in upwards of 1,000 extra calories, and that is without mentioning any late night trips to the fast food drive-thru window.
So take a minute to check out the Drinking Mirror app. Visualizing your liver 20 years down the road might be hard, but perhaps a flash-forward snapshot of your face might leave you rethinking your usual activities on Friday and Saturday nights. Have fun, take care of yourself and remember the decisions you make now can impact the rest of your life.
Jordan Shagina is a Health Education Intern and can be reached at [email protected]