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Comment by erelong | Hacker News Reader

certain long clothes allows for skipping sunscreen entirely in perpetuity

This isn't realistic for something likeriding your bike where you get lots of sun on your face and limbs.

The limbs you can deal with, at least. I've done century rides in 100°F+ weather wearing UPF 50 sleeves the whole way... it's actually quite nice because you dip them in water, and they end up staying saturated for a long time. Together with the airflow from the ride it keeps you cool as well as protecting from the sun

Unless you are talking about a Burqa, i think that is not true.

Also a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawb

While this is commonly brought up as a religious issue, religion obviously predates sunscreen but not sunburn, so it could've originally been a practical reason --- elevated to religious dogma --- why it is customary from that part of the world to wear highly concealing clothing.

Your clothes still need to have a certain SPF, and you're not gonna wear gloves when 100 outside are you?

Just about any shirt is going to have a higher spf/upf than any normal sunscreen. Also who puts sunscreen on their hands??

A long sleeve sunshirt with a hood or better yet a floppy hat is where it’s at. I have a couple of the Colombia PFG ones that I wear for working outside, though I’d like to see if I can find something cotton instead since I’m not a huge fan of synthetic fibers.

I put sunscreen on my hands or I will have completely burnt hands. There's many of us who cant have more than about an hour in direct sunlight (and sometimes much less) before redness and soon burning occurs.

Who puts sunscreen on their hands? People in the sun who want to avoid wrinkles and burns and skin cancer on their hands.

If it's exposed skin, it gets sunscreen.

Nearly everyone I know puts sunscreen on their hands. Here in Australia, the world melanoma capital, sun safety is drilled into you as a kid, to the extent that "no hat no play" used to be official policy in most schools.

Pretty much this

Also for the other comments there are gloves and face masks but I think most people do fine without them unless you're working outside

For the nerds here working indoors during the hottest times of the day... they may need more sun than they get really, rather than blocking it with toxic sunscreens (depends on where they live?)

While generally true, it's worth remembering that thin shirts can have an SPF as low as 50 or so, which isn't much.

It means only 2% of the harmful rays (UVA) are getting through the shirt or alternatively the skin under the shirt can spend 50 times as long in the sun as it could without any protection.

Correction: UVB, not UVA.

Correction: the standard used for clothing is UPF, not SPF. They're similar, but there are differences.

SPF is logarithmic so high numbers can be misleading. The FDA has recently banned labeling above SPF 60 for this reason. Doctors usually recommend 30

A typical tshirt is closer to SPF 7, depending on color and weight.

Just from basic logic this has to be false. Maybe there are some translucent t-shirts that are SPF 7 but my skin always reacts much more to sun exposed parts that have SPF applied than it ever did under t-shirt. And no i use high quality SPF50 and reapply.

That sounds right, but SPF 50 shirts are readily available, and at least the ones made from polyester are cheap.

I put sunscreen on my hands.

People who don't enjoy sunburns on their hands put sunscreen on their hands.

Staying behind UV protective glass panes while browsing Hacker News does the same.

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