The best after-sun skin care is not just a cream – Part 1

The best after-sun skin care is not just a cream – Part 1

Check your skin

After spending time in the sun, it is important to have your skin checked to detect early signs of skin cancer and to repair the sun damage. After you’ve suffered sunburn, which is painful and causes redness, swelling, itching and peeling, the skin has to recover. It may take a few days to do so, but then most of us forget about our sunburn and go back out into the sun, again and again, and become even more sunburnt, or tanned.
However, our skin clocks up the amount of time that is spent in the sun and gradually becomes damaged and can develop skin cancer over time.
Prevention is always better than cure and, in previous blogs, I have spoken about how you can protect your skin type against the harsh summer sun. In this blog I want to talk to you about having your skin checked by Dr Jennifer Crawley to help you detect the early signs of skin cancer, and have a skin biopsy, if required, to give you peace of mind.
First of all, you should be checking your skin regularly. To do so effectively, you have to know your skin, so you need to be aware of where you freckle the most and where your moles are, and then you will recognise if there is any change in the freckling or in one of your moles.
If there are new areas of skin freckling, a pigmented lump, flakiness, irritation, bleeding or ulceration, it could either be a pre-cancerous skin lesion or actual skin cancer, and it will require care and management by Dr Jennifer Crawley, the consultant dermatologist at Clinica London.