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It’s impossible to avoid the Aussie sun entirely, but Australians are well aware of the dangers of too much exposure. Some 40 years of Slip Slop Slap (and more recently added, Seek and Slide) campaigns have reinforced this, not to mention the unpleasant experience of a sunburn most of us have encountered at some point.
Skin does repair itself, but how long does that take? If you hit the beach for half an hour, then retreat to the shade for a while, then go back out, will the damage have gone back to baseline? Or are you accumulating it?
Like most things, it’s complicated.
How does the sun damage your skin?
Spending a day in the sun can cause 100,000 DNA defects in each exposed skin cell. DNA is the genetic information your body needs to build and run itself. There’s a copy in each of your cells, except for red blood cells and the layer of dead cells at the very surface of the skin.
Your cells have a very effective DNA repair process, called nucleotide excision repair, for this kind of damage. But some damage still slips through the cracks.
When your skin’s DNA monitoring system decides there is just too much damage to be effectively repaired, it tells the cells to self-destruct and calls in the immune system to finish them off. This causes the symptoms of sunburn: redness, pain, and sometimes blistering.
However, you don’t have to get sunburnt to start accumulating damage. A tan is your skin reacting to DNA damage by increasing the amount of melanin, which alters the skin’s colour, to mitigate future UV exposure. Though this only gives you the same protection as a 2-4 SPF sunscreen.
UV radiation in Australia is so high, particularly during summer, that you can start accumulating damage in the time it takes to hang out the washing or walk to the bus stop.
Even so, the amount of DNA damage is proportional to the amount of UV exposure, so longer exposures or exposures at high-UV times of day cause much more damage..
Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/amp/how-long-does-it-take-for-skin-to-repair-after-sun-exposure-196556