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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the "sunscreen inside" people are those trying to maximize their visible skin health and beauty. If you don't care about your physical looks, as least above all else, I imagine the trade off to getting regular direct sunlight is well worth it.

But it is fairly intuitive that sunlight's ultraviolet radiation at any strength is going to degrade your skin over long periods of time.

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> But it is fairly intuitive that sunlight's ultraviolet radiation at any strength is going to degrade your skin over long periods of time.

As an example of this, see this delivery truck driver who had the sun hitting mostly the left side of his face for twenty-eight years:

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trucker-accumulates-skin-damage...

Could you link to studies backing up your claim about 'visible skin health and beauty'?. I have searched for these a lot, but I cannot find thorough literature study type of research about this.

Except for the 'sitting in office all year and then sit in the sun for two weeks straight and get 14 sun burns is not good, so you should use sunscreen' message, which is not very helpful and could conclude also that one 'should expose to sun moderately, e.g. at least an hour a day if possible'.

Not sure about studies, but in a recent deep dive into skincare, all the YouTubers I watched considered it a basic fact, so the assumption is definitely prevalent. Studies would most likely be sponsored by skincare companies.

There's also that picture of the trucker that shows the damage the sun did to the left side of his face after 28 years of driving a truck. Google "picture of trucker with sun damage"

Photoaging is the term and a quick search yields a few studies. Ex: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8802961/. And anecdotally, I never used sun screen and was exposed to a lot of sunburns in the Mediterranean climate. My skin is visibly older and more wrinkled than my peers who used skin protections. My back is full of freckles and dermatologist said this is due to sunburn. I guess sunburn doesn’t need a lot of studies to show it’s very damaging to the skin?

That is kind of my point. Sun burn is not good. But without sun burn? The article you sent doesn't make clear whether photoaging always happens, or only on sun burn or other high doses of exposure.

Maybe the trick is to spread sun exposure across the body rather than mostly let our limbs and face take most the sun. Protect those areas, but get fuller body sun more often. The parts of my body on the boundary between heavy exposure and no exposure seem relatively okay. They have a slight freckle-ness to them, but arguably acceptable. (I'm not young; time-tested.)

There are also all these UV photos showing hidden sun damage. Example: https://www.aad.org/public/everyday-care/sun-protection/sun-...

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