Bonjour! I recently went on holiday to the south of France, that's the reason for my lack of posts! Although i had a fabulous time splashing around in the pool and walking around beautiful french towns and patisseries i unfortunately got very sun burnt on my second day there.
Now i am relatively pale, not white as a sheet or anything but definitely not olive skinned! Every time i go on holiday i say to myself "this time you HAVE to put on suncream" as i have abit of a reputation for getting burnt....
But on this holiday unfortunately i fell asleep in the sun on the first and second days and didn't get on any sun cream at all practically, now it was really quite hot, pushing 30 degrees C and not putting on suncream in that kind of weather is severely dangerous for your skin. We all know about skin cancer and how you should really be putting on a suncream every day if your are going to be in the sun for longer than a 15 minute period. Unfortunately i learnt this the hard way.
The first evening my skin felt red raw, and it was mainly focused on my face which made it painful to talk. I have previously had sunburn cheeks and nose but not to this degree. I cannot describe how painful it was, at the time i compared it to child birth....looking back, maybe a slight over exaggeration? haaha! I did keep thinking i must take photos of it to warn you all off (yes it was that bad!) but i felt absolutely awful about the state my skin was in and i had no one to blame but myself! I have got photos from the last day of my holiday when it was finally starting to clear, but about 4 days in my whole face turned into one big blister, it was weeping and painful and i couldn't go in the sun for more than 15 minutes without feeling like it was going to melt off my entire face! (again slight over exaggeration!?) unfortunately even though i kept my face out of the sun on the second day my arm got burnt and also blistered so now i had a blistered face and left arm so was really finding it hard to enjoy my holiday, plus i felt like everyone was staring at me, because i looked like i had been in a fire! I have come to the conclusion that i actually got a very nasty 1st degree burn, i think we all forget how powerful the sun actually is! Here are a couple of the photos of my skin so you can get a idea, remember this was a week on!
I know these photos are horrible, but i really want to urge people to wear sunscreen, almost 2 weeks on and my skin is still not back to itself. Once the blisters had finally gone down my face started to crack, and every time i spoke it cracked. Putting on moisturiser was practically impossible it felt like it was burning on my broken skin, even though it was simple! I was basically left looking and feeling terrible! My lips had swollen up and once my skin finally started to peel off it was so uncomfortable.

Here's a photo of my arm on holiday, just as the blister was forming and then a second photo taken  today, as you can see it is still peeling and with some quite bad patches still there. Luckily its stopped hurting now thanks to alot of aloe vera! But that only happened about 2 days ago!
I have now learnt my lesson, I'm not saying by any means i will be wearing sun tan lotion every single day of my life but i will be taking so much better care of my skin, these photos are a constant reminder of why i should be wearing it! As a reminder if you have been burnt in the past i would recommend going to your doctor and getting any moles checked in case of any problems you may have in the future. here's a bit of advice from cancer research uk click this link!
I hope this post might have changed one persons mind about going out in the sun without at least SPF15 on their skin! And just because your skin has been repaired on the outside, inside it may never be the same!

Labels: beauty, bloggers, cancer research uk, dangers, france, holiday, peeling, skin damage, SPF, summer, sun, sunburn