Is It Ever Safe to Sunbathe? | ELLE Canada Magazine | Beauty, Fashion and Lifestyle Trends & Celebrity News

In my own family, much like the aforementioned cartoon cats, sun-seeking was a hobby, a pleasure and a sport. I fondly recall my parents, my sister and I tanning poolside on loungers in a happy lineup, passing the Hawaiian Tropic or the (since discontinued) Bain de Soleil Orange Gelée (both SPF 4) like familial batons. (This, I should clarify, was in the ’80s.) In my family, “You look pale” landed like an insult, one degree away from, say, “You look tubercular.” “Pale” was pejorative. When I was about 11 or 12, I travelled on my own for the first time to visit my grandmother at her condo in Palm Beach, Fla., for a week of what turned out to be mostly inclement weather. Upon my return home, my dad picked me up at the airport and appraised the state of my complexion: “You have a little tan!” he declared. A damning review.

This was, of course, many moons (and suntans) ago, and, speaking of families, I now have an ever-growing family of fine lines and wrinkles as souvenirs. By now, I would have had to have spent my life living under a rock—not my preferred perch—to be ignorant of the sun’s dangers. Carroll outlines them for me, her tone as sharp as a shadow on a sunny day. “Sun is radiation,” she says. “UVB radiation damages your DNA, [making] the cells replicate either too rapidly or improperly, and that’s what a cancer is—it’s cells behaving badly.” Sun exposure also wreaks aesthetic damage, causing hyperpigmentation and accelerating the breakdown of collagen, which results in fine lines and wrinkles. (Check.)