Fun in the Sun

During this past free weekend, eight students ventured to Cinque Terre in an attempt to experience one of the most beautiful places in Italy. The hiking got progressively more difficult as we advanced between towns. On Saturday, we hiked from Vernazza, where we stayed, to Monterosso, which contains the beaches of Cinque Terre. Nevertheless, we prevailed through the journey of what seemed like endless stairs, arrived at Monterosso and immediately searched for an appropriate beach.
Due to my personal skin tone, I usually do not apply sunscreen on the beach. I rarely sunburn and usually tan well. This time, however, I did get sunburned along with darkening my skin tone by many shades, almost to the tone of Helen after a glass of wine. All of my exposed body is much tanner, but my shoulders are a bit sunburned, so hiking back with a backpack was a bit painful, not mentioning the inability to take a hot shower.
Sunburn takes place when the exposure of UV light to skin is greater than the protective capacity of the individual’s melanin. In general, melanin content is greater in darker skinned individuals. This explains why I seem to sunburn less easily, though in this case due to a lack of sunscreen, I got sunburned anyway. Sunburn is triggered by direct DNA damage from absorbing UV-B photons. UVB light causes thymine base pairs adjacent to each other to bond together to form thymine dimers, which is a disruption in the strand, which reproductive enzymes cannot copy. This causes sunburn.
















Works Cited
Parrish, John, Kurt Jaenicke, and Rox Anderson. "ERYTHEMA AND MELANOGENESIS ACTION SPECTRA OF NORMAL HUMAN SKIN *." Photochemistry and Photobiology 36.2 (1982): 187-191. Wiley Interscience. 23 June 2009.