Tips for Your Healthiest Summer Skin Ever

Summer means time in the sun. Time in the sun means damage to your skin. Find out how you can still enjoy the summer sun without doing harm to your skin!

Having a base tan will not prevent your skin from burning.

Your skin cells doesn't just see a burn as damage. They also see a tan as damage. This forces the cells to get to work to repair damaged skin. Repeating this over and over throughout a lifetime causes cellular mutations leading to skin cancer.

You can get sun damage to skin covered by a bathing suit. 

You can get skin cancer anywhere on skin that have been exposed to UV radiation, even if your skin is covered by a swimsuit or clothing. See a dermatologist who will check your scalp and parts that your bathing suit has covered. No skin is immune to melanoma.

Tanning does not help acne.

A tan can help mask the redness of acne, but there is no research that has actually found a tan helps reduce or clear acne. Tanning or laying out in the sun causes sweating which can cause clogged pores which can lead to even more acne.

Reapply sunscreen every 2 hours.

You should be using at least an SPF of 25, but no matter the SPF, you should be reapplying sunscreen every two hours. Use 1 ounce, or the amount that would fit into a shot glass, to cover all of your exposed skin. Reapply the same amount every 2 hours. Look for sunscreen with zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. Sunscreens with this ingredient will protect you from UVB and UVA light.

Tanned skin does not equal healthy skin.

There is nothing healthy about a tan. Both indoor tanning bed and sunlight emit ultraviolet light that causes skin cancer. The only healthy tan comes from a bottle of self tanner or a spray tan.

Wear sunscreen indoors.

Really. You need protection anywhere there are windows like in your office and car. Windows only block UVB rays, not UVA rays. UVA rays are the ones that cause accelerated aging and an increased risk of melanoma.

Know your terms.

The sunlight that reaches us is made up of two types of harmful rays. The first is long wave ultraviolet A (UVA) and short wave ultraviolet B (UVB). UVA rays penetrated deep into the skin's thickest layer and UVB rays usually burn the superficial layers of the skin. Both cause skin cancer.

SPF or Sun Protection Factor measures sunscreen protection from UVB rays, but does not measure how well a sunscreen will protect from UVA rays. An SPF of 30 provides 30 times the protection of no sunscreen. 

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer. Cancerous growths develop when damage to skin cells caused by ultraviolet radiation from the sun or tanning beds triggers mutations that lead skin cells to multiply rapidly and form malignant tumors. Other forms of skin cancer include Basal Cell Carcinoma and Squamous Cell Carcinoma.

For even from summer skin tips check out The Melt-Free Face and Three Secrets to Incredible Skin!