You know that gnawing, unwavering temptation.
It was a fun beach weekend, filled with hours tanning on a breezy beach under blissfully sunny skies. You probably applied one coat of SPF 15 sunscreen each day to make yourself feel protected but forgot about second coats during your afternoon naps.
The next day, you awoke with an angry burn, followed by days of even more tingling pain and — you guessed it — flaky, peelable skin.
Peeling that sunburn is harmless — satisfying, even — right? It can’t actually hurt you, since the damage is already done? Wrong. You might give yourself a secondary infection that could scar, says Dr. Susan Weinkle, affiliate clinical professor of dermatology at the University of Florida.
And don’t even think about using a lint roller, as some dark corners of the internet suggest. Peeling of any kind breaks the skin’s barrier, inviting germs to settle in and inflammation to take hold, Weinkle explains.
Of course, not all peels are alike.
“There are different levels, sometimes it’s a very superficial peel, where you’re just kind of peeling off the top layer called the stratum corneum, and sometimes the burn can be deeper,” Weinkle says. “It depends on the level of the burn or how deeply it peels off.”
Regardless, sunburn is nothing to brush off. In fact, Weinkle says just seven severe sunburns in your lifetime can significantly increase your risk for skin cancers like melanoma.
“You have to think of a sunburn as a wound,” Weinkle says. “You’ve wounded your skin, and so you have to do things to help it heal.”
And how can you help it heal? Keeping the skin lubricated or hydrated (Weinkle recommends using an ointment like Aquaphor) will make you less prone to pick at the affected skin, potentially removing more epidermal cells than would have fallen off naturally.
Applying cold-brewed tea bags, which contain soothing tannic acid, to affected areas can also help dull the pain of acute sunburn.
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Don’t Peel Your Sunburn Unless You Want an Infection originally appeared on usnews.com
