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.
One reply on “the color of skin cancer”
After reading my post, my husband felt it necessary to reassure me that I do not have skin cancer. I know that I do not have skin cancer. My whole post was *supposed* to be about how tan no longer looks healthy (to me, at least), and how I would like to avoid skin cancer. So … rest assured readers, I’m not so stupid as to think getting one bad sunburn means I am going to die next week of skin cancer …