Sunlight is actually beneficial for our body. It enables our skin to produce vitamin D. Vitamin D is very important for our body. It is difficult to get vitamin D from food. It is found mostly in oily fish. If we do not consume a lot of oily fish, we can get a small amount of vitamin D from food. Therefore, our skin must come into contact with the sun’s rays.
Despite these benefits, the sun’s rays can damage the skin, such as sunburn. There are studies that show that sunburn increases the risk of melanoma, especially in people with fair skin and moles. In order to be protected from these negative effects, it is necessary to measure the sun exposure in sensitive people. Sun protection should be at a level that will not be damaged by the sun, but vitamin D deficiency will not occur. It is recommended that the vitamin D value in the serum is around 70nmol/L, but this value has not been fully accepted.
In addition to biological aging, the aging of our skin is caused by external factors (such as sun, cold, air pollution, make-up materials) and internal factors (such as nutritional disorder, smoking, stress).
The natural aging of the skin increases with the sun and occurs earlier. Changes in our skin such as dark spots, fine wrinkles, loss of elasticity, increase in vascularity and coarsening increase with the effect of the sun. As a result, our skin ages prematurely as a result of prolonged, intense and chronic exposure to UV and sunlight. You can easily see this in your own body. Look at an area that is not exposed to the sun, such as your buttocks, and your skin will be younger than your skin in areas that receive a lot of sun, such as the neck and face. With sun protection, we can reduce photoaging, that is, the effects of aging due to sun rays.
It is very important to protect children from the sun. 50-80% of sun damage on our skin occurs during childhood and adolescence.
Exposure to sunlight that causes sunburn has been proven to increase the risk of skin cancer later in life. Sun exposure is one of the factors that increase the risk of skin cancer the most.
Each sunburn increases the harmful effect. For this reason, it is never too late to care about protection against the sun with the logic of profiting from wherever the damage is done.
It is very harmful to get an artificial tan with a solarium. It significantly increases the risk of skin cancer. Solarium increases the tan of the skin with UV rays, but does not increase the skin’s self-protection from sun rays. Therefore, a tanned skin with a solarium cannot protect itself from sunburn while in the sun.
The first rule in sun protection is to use sunscreen cream. However, it is still not safe for someone who has applied sunscreen cream to stay under the sun for a long time. It is not currently possible to literally block the sun. No sunscreen can provide complete protection. People should not stay in the sun for too long, thinking that sunscreens block all harmful rays. Sunbathing should be avoided between the hours of 11.00-15.00, when the sun’s rays are most intense.
Especially people with moles need better protection from the sun. It is important for people with moles to know which moles are dangerous. In order to understand which moles you should consult a doctor, you need to apply the ABCD rule.
A: It is asymmetry. It is important if there are uneven color and shape changes in the mole itself, that is, if there is asymmetry.
B: Border means border. It is the condition of having indentations and crookedness at the borders of the mole.
A: Color is color. The fact that the colors of moles are different is that they are in different colors (black, brown, dark brown, red) instead of all being one color.
D: Diameter diameter. It is important that the diameter of the mole is greater than 60 mm.
If you have moles that contain 2 or more of the 4 criteria in the ABCD rule, you should see a dermatologist as soon as possible without panic.
