Spring is here and it’s a great time to remind you to wear sunscreen daily. Not only does sunscreen guard against sun damage to your skin, it also helps prevent skin cancer. While many of the treatments that we perform at Generations Medical Aesthetics can improve or diminish the signs of aging (such as fine lines and wrinkles, brown spots, dull skin, small facial veins, and more), the best thing you can do for your skin is to stay out of the sun and wear sunscreen every day.
To protect your skin against harmful UV rays, follow these tips:
- Seek shade between peak sun hours of 10am-2pm, and whenever your shadow looks shorter than you.
- Cover up in style. Wear a wide-brimmed hat to protect your face from the sun, and sunglasses to protect your eyes.
- Slather on the sunscreen daily. Apply sunscreen to all the places your clothes won’t cover, be sure to use a sunscreen that offers broad-spectrum protection and reapply it every 2 hours.
- Forget about indoor tanning – the rays from tanning beds accelerate skin aging.
A new study has also uncovered the fact that we can still get skin cancer in the shade. After being in the sun, your skin cells have a post-sunshine hangover that lasts for hours. Molecules excited by UV rays keep on damaging the DNA in skin cells even in complete darkness. There is hope that this finding will lead to a new generation of skin cancer preventives that are applied after a day in the sun and block the delayed effect.