Anti-Ageing Straws

Mark Honeychurch - 29 October 2024

As part of my recent delegation of the task of finding newsletter topics, where I’ve started asking my kids for ideas, I was given the topic of anti-ageing, or anti-wrinkle, straws. I guess with the popularity of Stanley cups and other new-fangled drinkware, it was only a matter of time before innovation came to straws.

These weird straws seem to be a thing not only on Temu and AliExpress, but also closer to home in online shops such as Dick Smith:

As you can see from the picture above, the idea of this straw is that rather than sucking on the end of it, with a small cross-section between your lips and a need to purse your lips, you put the straw across your lips, and there’s a hole in the side of it to drink from (and a cap at the end to stop the drink falling out!). This change is meant to avoid the pursing of your lips, and, in a leap of logic, is in turn meant to avoid wrinkles. The basic idea is that, because vertical wrinkles form around your mouth whenever you purse your lips, over time these wrinkles can become permanent and make you look like you’re ageing prematurely.

My first reaction to this was that it was just a daft idea. It seemed unlikely that simply using your lip muscles in this way would cause wrinkles to remain after you’ve relaxed your lips. But, as a good skeptic, I jumped online to see what I could find about lip wrinkles - and what I found made me less sure about my assumption. I very quickly learned about the existence of Smoker’s Lines - vertical wrinkles around the lips, also sometimes called peri-oral lines, that tend to be a phenomenon that happens to people who smoke cigarettes.

Well, this was interesting. Suddenly this was more complex than I first thought. So, I looked a little more into smoker’s lines and their causes. It turns out that smoking is a major factor in causing these lines, but there are also other factors including genetics, sun exposure, and the inevitable march of time. If smoking is a major factor in their formation, though, does this mean that people sucking on the end of straws are also at risk of ending up with these wrinkles?

Much as I tried to find some reliable evidence either way, sadly the internet is filled with cosmetic surgery companies who seem happy to just make claims without backing them up with anything concrete. One thing I did find, though, is that it’s not just the repetitive use of the lip muscles by someone smoking that is to blame - there’s also damage done by the inhalation of cigarette smoke, which apparently can “degrade collagen, impair blood flow, and damage skin cell DNA”.

On top of this, I figure that casual smokers are likely to have less of a problem with Smoker’s Lines than a hardcore, 40 or 60-a-day chain smokers. Now, I’m not sure how many minutes of a day your average straw user sucks on a straw - after all, those Stanley cups are pretty damn huge, and might take a few minutes of cumulative sucking to empty. But there’s a pretty low limit on how much you can comfortably drink in a day without having to make trips to the bathroom every 10 minutes. Let’s say that a 40oz (1200ml) Stanley cup, as shown below, is enough fluid for a day. Given a rough estimate from this paper of around 20ml per sip, that would mean that emptying one of these behemoths would take around 60 sucks.

In contrast, someone who has an addiction to smoking and the ability to get through a pack a day is likely spending quite a lot of their time sucking. According to the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, a cigarette burns for, on average, around 5 minutes, and during that time a smoker would typically take around 10 puffs from the cigarette. For a 20-a-day smoker, that would be 200 puffs, or sucks, per day. For heavy smokers, this could be as many as 400 or even 600 sucks.

Now, from what I can tell, smoking sucks last longer than straw sucks - although I think I’ve reached the end of my ability to find useful data on the internet. So, I may be comparing apples to oranges here if I just simply put these numbers side by side. And, also, it may be that sucking air through a cigarette filter requires more effort, and more pursing of the lips, than sucking water or a similar fluid through a straw. I’ve basically found myself in uncharted territory at about this point, and further conjecture is likely to become too inaccurate to be useful.

Suffice it to say that, despite my reservations when I learned about Smoker’s Lines, I think I’ve travelled full circle and am back to the point where I feel it’s likely that these anti-wrinkle straws are a waste of money - and will probably end up making you look silly as well. If you find that you’re smoking 20 cigarettes a day AND drinking a couple of litres from a Stanley cup daily, and you’re too addicted to the ciggies to give them up, it might be worth considering these straws as a way to minimise your lip wrinkles. But you might want to skip the straws, and use the money you’ve saved to buy a hypnosis CD and book that will help you quit smoking.

(I’m just joking - Paul McKenna’s a British stage hypnotist who’s selling snake oil, and is currently spamming people on Facebook with silly adverts. Don’t trust anything he says, and definitely don’t buy his books or CDs)