I recently spent a week in sunny sunny southern California, and managed to get myself quite burned. Walking around Sea World, nonetheless – I wasn’t even laying out on the beach asking for it. I slathered on my husband’s SPF 50 at the beginning of the day, and thought I would be good.

Nope.

Throughout the afternoon, I kept asking how the back of my neck and shoulders looked, and my husband insisted I looked fine. I shouldn’t have taken his word for it – I know I’m not an insta-burner. I know it takes half a day for the true extent of my sun damage to display itself.

Luckily for me, I have spent a teeny amount of time in the Virginia sun this summer. My arms have seen enough to not be stark white, as have my face and neck – and by neck, I mean the neck that shows when I wear my regular, apparently fairly high-neck, t-shirts. So any skin that I normally expose to the sky only got the tiniest bit burned, there was only a small amount of peelage.

But, on Sea World day, I decided to wear a new, adorable shirt. Which exposed more skin than I usually expose. (Don’t get excited, it’s still very much classified a t-shirt, with actual sleeves and everything.) And every bit of skin that hasn’t seen the sun in years, burned. Burned bad. It peeled, over a week and a half, the most painful peeling I’ve ever experienced. And the skin that emerged was pink. Pink! I can’t ever recall having a burn that did anything but peel off to expose a beautiful tan.

My back and shoulders have stopped hurting, and I have been able to resume my nearly scalding hot showers. I have to admit, though, I haven’t looked at them to see what color they may have ended up. My arms however, have what most people would consider a nice color. A nice tan, but not leathery or obnoxious. (Obnoxious tans are the ones arrived at in a tanning bed, or through very deliberate laying out in the sun. You know the look.) Looking at my arms, though, all I see is the color of skin cancer. I see a glimpse of sun-spotted middle-aged lady arms. It doesn’t look good to me, and it most certainly doesn’t look healthy. I can’t wait till mid-fall when my tan finally fades to my own natural white with a tinge of yellowy-olive. I think I may just find myself a dermatologist to start cataloging my moles – and I’m definitely gonna start using more of that SPF 50.