Protecting skin against air pollution with ahiflower

Since the Industrial Revolution, air pollution has been a common daily experience for most people living in cities and for many people living with smokers or near power plants and factories. Much of the reforms of the environmental movement beginning in the 1960s and 1970s focused on cleaning up and preventing air pollution — smoke, smog, particulates, petroleum distillates, car and truck exhausts and brake dusts etc. — at their sources. 

These efforts greatly reduced people’s exposures to air pollution and therefore to ongoing risk for cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases including lung cancer, while also reducing ecological impacts like acid rain harming fish and frogs in watersheds downstream from polluted cities. However, the negative health impacts of air pollution (indoor and outdoor) still is the fifth largest contributor to mortality worldwide and over 90% of people globally are impacted by air pollution.¹

Progress has been made. In the 50 years between 1970 and 2020 in the United States, lung cancer more than halved from the #3 cause of death at 78 per 100,000 (men),² to less than 32 per 100,000 of (both sexes).³ Despite real human health and environmental wins resulting from controlling and reducing air pollution, however, much less attention has been given to the impacts of air pollution on the largest organ in our bodies: the skin.