How to protect your skin from the sun with natural remedies

Let's learn how to protect our skin from the sun with natural remedies and products

Summer is synonymous with sun, outdoor life, the sea (for the luckiest!) and tanning. Often our skin, which has lived until recently under heavy clothing, little exposed to atmospheric agents, is not ready, especially if it is very fair, delicate, and sensitive. Let's discover together in this post how to protect the skin from the sun with natural methods.

Prepare the skin for the new season

The best thing to do would be to prepare our skin in advance. One of the strategies to implement is (especially for light phototypes) to help the production of melanin by taking, at least two months before exposure, beta-carotene-based supplements. You could use carrot oil pearls or dried carrot extracts that, metabolized by our body, manage to stimulate melanin production and activate vitamin A to protect our skin. Nutrition also becomes fundamental, so let's integrate it with foods such as carrots, tomatoes, peppers, peaches, apricots to stimulate melanin production, which, among other things, helps prevent annoying sunburns as well as sunburns. We should also perform a deep exfoliation to eliminate dead cells, thus purifying the skin and freeing the pores so that the body is more receptive to protective and moisturizing products. Another important point is, in fact, hydration to be carried out both internally (increasing the intake of water, taking antioxidants - elements rich in vitamin E) and externally with natural products free of paraffin and petrolatum (such as shea butter or argan oil).

Skin and the sun

...positive effects

Sun rays, if absorbed in moderate amounts, can be an important ally for our health as they provide a series of benefits for the body. For example, they are essential for the synthesis of vitamin D (just stay in the sun for 20 minutes a day), and are also useful for the treatment of various pathologies (such as dermatological diseases like eczema). They also improve mood tone, cardiovascular activity; promote the production and release of certain substances (such as urocanic acid) with antioxidant and protective properties at the skin level. In addition, UV radiation shows a powerful antibacterial activity that is useful in the prevention and treatment of some skin manifestations.

...negative effects

However, if sun exposure is excessively prolonged and without adequate protection factors, UV rays quickly become enemies: they can leave unsightly skin spots as a gift, cause sunburns (with symptoms such as redness, swelling, dryness, burning, itching), in the long term they promote skin aging and the formation of wrinkles (the phenomenon of photoaging caused mainly by UVA rays that make the skin thickened, rough, loose, dry, and wrinkled) and can also generate free radicals, molecules containing atoms with an unpaired electron at the outermost orbital level and, therefore, are unstable. Instability creates chain processes that promote the production of toxic substances and can damage some cellular elements (DNA, proteins). But, above all, they can cause skin burns that, in addition to being painful (in more intense sunburns there is skin pain, burning, and itching, blisters and vesicles appear, followed by strong peeling. In some cases, more general symptoms may also occur, such as fever, nausea, and headache) represent one of the main risk factors for the appearance of skin tumors. In particular, it is mainly the sunburns suffered as children that favor the appearance in adulthood of melanoma, a very aggressive tumor that derives from the malignant transformation of melanocytes, the cells responsible for skin pigmentation.

Natural sunscreens with flowers and spices

So always remember to protect exposed skin with sunscreen products, choosing the most suitable ones for your phototype, remembering to apply them often. The protection you choose for your skin is fundamental, but you will have to take care to hydrate and pamper it continuously. You can therefore prepare excellent natural oils that will also give you a more intense and lasting tan. Remember to apply homemade tanning products only on already tanned skin! We have already seen in a previous article some natural remedies for the skin, in the next lines we will present you three other ideal products to protect the skin from the sun in a natural way with spices and herbs.

Nourishing tanning oil with corn oil and St. John's Wort flowers

To make this tanning oil, use 250 grams of corn oil and a handful of St. John's Wort flowers. Put all these ingredients together in a glass jar, mix well, seal tightly, and let it macerate for 10 days in the dark. After the necessary time, filter and add 100 grams of avocado oil, which will make the tanning oil more nourishing, and mix. Your ointment is ready to be applied before sun exposure.

Carrot tanning oil to bronze the skin

To make it, you will need two carrots and sunflower seed oil, which should preferably be obtained by cold pressing: this way it has a better final effect for our tanning oil. Wash the carrots, cut off the ends and