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Years of driving in the sun causes man’s face to wrinkle like a prune

Driving is potentially bad for your health in many ways. There’s a risk of crashing, sucking down carbon dioxide, getting fat from a lack of exercise, and now it seems there’s also a danger cars can make one side of your face look like a shrivelled up prune.

This is what 28 years of driving in the sun can do to half your face.
This is what 28 years of driving in the sun can do to half your face.

The picture you see above is of a 69-year-old delivery driver with a condition known as unilateral dermatoheliosis. The left left side of his face as we look at it seems pretty healthy. There are a few wrinkles, but they’re nothing you wouldn’t expect on a man of his age. However, the right side is a completely different story.

That half of his noggin is riddled with the sort of wrinkles that would make a raisin jealous. According to the New England Journal of Medicine this “thickening and wrinkling of the skin” was caused by 28 years of exposure to the sun on that half of his face.

Ultra violet rays find it difficult to pass through the passenger side of a vehicle’s cabin, but they flow through the driver’s side window with ease, beating down on a person’s fragile skin, causing irreparable damage.

According to doctors at Northwestern University who treated the man, he didn’t wear sunscreen — although you don’t have to be a dermatologist to work that one out.

The patient is otherwise healthy, but he should count himself lucky. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, “exposure to ultraviolet rays is linked to a higher rate of photocarcinogenesis, which has been shown to induce substantial DNA mutations and direct toxicity, leading to the formation of skin cancer.”

We don’t know about you guys, but from now on, we’re not getting behind the wheel without a faceful of factor 30. Your thoughts, as ever, can be scrawled in our comments section below and on Facebook.

Source: Fox News

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