I was thinking about how bad it is to get sun burned and I wondered what kids and adults did before suncreen. Obviously there were hats and clothes available, but is there a point at which a fair skinned white person/people (say a Viking clan on a sea voyage) are simply going to get tan enough to stop burning?
Was skin cancer rampant in the past?
We got sunburned.
I spent one summer working outdoors, and even though I quit work at noon, that was plenty enough to get burned. By the end of summer, however, I had developed a pretty dark tan and burned less.
As for skin cancer, I can’t quote statistics, but my grandfather, who was also fair skinned and worked outside for decades, did have several skin cancers removed. And since many skin cancers are slow to develop and slow to spread, I would imagine that many people did not live long enough for them to develop, or died of other causes before the lesions became large enough to become serious.
Historically, people who evolved white skin lived in areas where the sun didn’t shine so much: either areas well away from the equator, or rainy places like the UK… and the lower part of the UK was populated mostly by people from the areas further north, from what I understand.
White skin was further bred into certain people by noble inbreeding: nobility denoted not having to work out in the sun, so people who were naturally pale were considered to have bluer blood, so to speak. They intermarried and increases the genetic tendency for their equally non-labor-oriented children to be pale.
It’s only since the class system broke down in Europe that pale people returned to the fields and got sunburnt…
On cancer, considering that we had an ozone layer 100 years ago, skin cancer was a lot less common… in fact most kinds were, because of less daily radiation exposure (about 1% of what we get today) and less other pollutants in our lives. People mostly died of lung cancer (consumption) or prostate cancer (Victorianism :D) if cancer was involved.
No cites. Contradict me freely. Just my knowledge vs. your research.
I had red hair, freckles and fair skin and people like me got sunburned. No, we didn’t tan much at all. We just burned and peeled, because we didn’t know any better. As I got older I tanned ever so slightly more, but never much.
For the past 52 years I have lived on the desert. After the first five years or so I wised up. I started wearing broad brimmed hats, long sleeved shirts and no shorts, winter and summer. I’ve had little skin trouble but the “sun is good for you” freaks look at me funny, all buttoned up in long sleeves when the temperature is 115F. Let 'em.
Main thing is, white people stuck to the less sunny parts. When you think about it, really white people are a bit of an oddity. Asians, American Indians, Southern Europeans, Africans, Native Australians are all olive skinned or better. And that is all it takes to be pretty much burn proof. I’m fairly olive skinned for a white boy, and if I go out in the sun enough I get brown enough not to burn much or even at all.
The sun burn thing would only really have got under way as whiteys started moving to the sunnier bits.
Yours, from the sun cancer capital of the world, Queensland Australia, (where white people come to live in the sun and die).
Olive oil was used for thousands of years as sunscreen. Greasy but it works. Cheap alternative when your expensive sunscreen bottle is empty.
Olive oil? I thought any kind of oil attracted the sun and made you burn more quickly?
Genteel women used sunshades or parasols, hats, veils, gloves, pretty much completely covered up when they went out on sunny days. White skin was fashionable, and a sign of social superiority (not just white vs. black, but untanned vs. tanned).
Wide brimmed hats, umbrellas, clothes, body paint, canopies…
Being of a rather whitish/bluish/reddish complexion I still use all of the above except the body paint, which has been replaced with Factor 16 or higher sun protection.
Sparc
PS Olive oil was never used as protection, only a way to make sure the skin didn’t dry out. As a matter of fact it’s really dangerous for a light skinned person to use fatty oils in the sun since it rather has the reverse effect, it’s the same thing as being wet in the sun, except it lasts longer. DS
Sorry about the redundancy of that post… it sat around in my browser for ages while I was doing other things…
Does consumption=lung cancer? I thought it was a bacterial thing. That said, I know they’re now finding that some bacterias/viruses are linked with cancer.
What decade? What century? Where? This is not universally true in any way. Fashion has always fluctuated in the urban societies, much the same way that it does these days. Take Parisian fashion in 1475 and compare it to 1465 and you will find pretty much the same huge difference as between 1975 and 1965.
We have the perception that it didn’t only because we don’t see the trees for all the forest (to reversely paraphrase the old saying). Someone from the 17th century would probably perceive male fashion of the 20th century as completely uniform due to the suit.
Sparc
Consumption = tuberculosis (usually – I suppose other illnesses may have been mistaken for tuberculosis on occasion). IIRC, lung cancer was very rare until cigarette smoking took off.
Last night I was slogging through the first hour of the film “Hawaii”. The missionary played by Max Von Sydow gets a letter telling him that he has been chosen to work in Hawaii. He is told as preparation to work in the fields at his father’s farm for a couple of weeks without a hat on.
Throughout the movie, he never looks like he develops any sort of tan despite living on Maui for 20 years.
Sparc-------
My Grandparents are from the old country…yes, it was fashionable to have pale skin— it meant you were wealthier. (They are Donauschwaben from Croatia).
If you look at history books…people in Europe powdered their faces to look whiter…men and women… Just a thought.
I think Hollywood in the 40-50’s made it fashionable to be tan and that started the whole shebang.