To wonder about sunburnt children before suncream was popularised?

I honestly had never heard of sunscreen as a child in the 70’s
By the 80’s it was ‘sun tan lotion’ and it was specifically bought to encourage a tan - I think it was factor 2 or 4 and looked like cooking oil.
I also remember it being very expensive and my parents definitely didn’t think it was a necessary purchase and couldn’t have afforded it anyway.

The first sunscreen I owned, I bought myself as an adult in the 90’s and it was for my baby.

literally my mum would put me naked on a picnic blanket in the full sun in our garden for at least a couple hours as a baby all summer because she thought it was good for me- to prevent rickets and because I was jaundiced she told me.

UV light is a treatment for jaundice, so it's quite likely that she was told to do this when you were newborn and whether she was told to continue or she just assumed that it would be a good idea, either is plausible.

Also vitamin D does help prevent rickets and we do get this from sun exposure. It's a bit of a balancing act really.

This is actually still not safe. I live in Australia and there is so much emphasis at the moment on how harmful incidental sun exposure is. We have a lot of melanoma here.

Yes and we didn’t all understand them. I was a Uni student and used SPF 8 which was considered sensible at the time. SPF 4 with tan accelerator was what the pool side crew who worked on their tan used.

I was sporty- cycling, camping, canoeing- so not in a bikini and didn’t care about a tan just anvoiding burns. I was told SPF 8 protected for 8 hours unless you went swimming, so thought this is good for me to use when outside all day. I would sweat and it would run into my eyes and sting, so I would reapply anyway. They didn’t have special suncream for the face then.

But still SPF 8 is pitifully low. I knew that ten years later when I had children. They had SPF 50 - the kind that went on like white paste!

Yep, and for awhile the theory was if you have a base tan before going on holiday you are less likely to burn. So a base tan was good and protective.
The thought was only severe sunburns are linked to skin cancer at the time.

But the sun cream that was available was wholly inadequate for those of us with fair skin, no matter how responsible our parents were. Factor 15 came out whilst I was a kid and was considered very high protection through most of my youth. I think my every day moisturiser is that protective now! There was no water resistant sunscreen even invented until the late 70s and a lot of the products around in my childhood really only protected against UVB anyway . So it's not just a matter of people being unaware (though I don't think that knowledge around the risks of excessive sun exposure were widely known) or not caring, really effective products were simply not available.

I’d completely forgotten about the ‘building the tan up gradually’ theory. We all did it.

I had never heard of sunscreen in the 70s, and people here used to try and get burnt. I can remember my friend and I putting baby oil on our legs and sitting in the doorway in our tea breaks at work, hoping to get a tan. People really had no idea how dangerous the sun was when I was a child in the 60s and even as a teen in the 70s. We used to sit beside the school pool all day watching the swimming sports with not a hat in sight and no sunscreen.

That is true. But sun exposure in the 70s was a lot like how smoking was viewed in the 50s. The general public opinion was that you don’t need sun cream as the sun isn’t some awful cancer causing threat to life. Many, like my dad, thought it was overpriced snake oil and the chemicals in it more likely to cause cancer than a bit of Sun. A certain % even thought a tan was healthy……get that sun on you,

literally my mum would put me naked on a picnic blanket in the full sun in our garden for at least a couple hours as a baby all summer because she thought it was good for me- to prevent rickets and because I was jaundiced she told me.

Then came hot summer holidays and the hole in the ozone layer. Plus sun beds (how on earth they are still legal I do not know)

I know! One opened in the next village a few weeks ago! I was surprised that 1- they are still legal and 2- anyone thinks there's a market fit

Red head family growing up in Cornwall in 70s and 80s.

We did burn sometimes but this was minimised by always keeping a top on - even when swimming in the sea. Hats hats and more hats and keeping out of the worst of the sun. Ie beach early or late. Going to woods / shaded parks on really hot days.

I remember suncream from mid 70s?

I was born in 1982 and as a child we often went to Spain on holiday and definitely had sun cream applied. But probably only factor 8 or 15 at the highest. My mum used to use the factor 3 oils and glisten in the sun! We were made to wear T-shirts and stay in the shade in the peak midday sun. I can remember getting a bit burnt on the odd occasion but usually due to missing areas when applying or not reapplying lotion. These days I always use factor 30 as a minimum.

When I was a child (80s) i hated suncream so much i managed to convince my parents i was allergic to it

I have olive skin so didn’t really burn but it might have done damage I don’t know about yet!

We burnt and, for some of us, there has been a price to pay.
I've never had a great memory but I will never forget the pain of sunburn so bad that it blistered and the unbearable feeling of just a sheet touching my back. I was probably around 12
My mum has had a few melanomas removed and has half of one nostril missing because, due to her age and health, the skin graft never took.
I am grateful for the knowledge I had as a parent so that I could make sure that my children did not burn

The wisdom of hindsight, experience and health messages. I'm sure decades from now I'm sure parents will be questioning practices that now seem normal.

We just got burnt - and I was a teen in the 70s and no-one really knew about sun damage even then. I used to be as brown as a berry, as the common saying was, as a child. After that it was more a case of getting sunburnt, going red, peeling - then doing it all over again. I'm in NZ btw, so at more risk than those in the UK. I had really bad sunburn on my back when I was 16 and my whole back blistered. Never again!

By the way, TVs were invented in 1925 and most people had them in the 60s and 70s! You didn't necessarily get programmes all day, and it stopped late evening. There were only 3 channels in the UK until the early 80s when Channel 4 started. I think the lack of outdoor play postdated TVs by many years. That came about when parents began to worry much more about their kids being unsupervised and when video/ electronic games became a big thing.

Yeah, we burned a lot. My mum did make sure we had suncream on when we were on holiday, but it was low factor, applied once in the morning and that was it. No hats. I have pretty vivid memories of being awake in the night shivering and burning up, sometimes sick with sunstroke too. I also used to go on sunbeds to get a base tan' before holidays in the 90s. Absolutely nuts looking back.

Same here. I was born in 1974. I’m firskinned. Sunburn/sunstroke was a regular occurrence 😫😫as was covering yourself in cooking oil to get a tan.

I was a kid in the 90s but my parents never put suncream on me because I tan well and they liked how it looked.

I spent my 18th birthday doing all the pre-op stuff ready for my skin cancer removal operation the next day.

Yep and now my back is covered in ugly moles :(

A very reasonable question OP!
We all got burnt!

It was Chanel who made a sun tan be fashionable. Before her a tan was considered lower class, as your job kept you outside all day.

Then came hot summer holidays and the hole in the ozone layer. Plus sun beds (how on earth they are still legal I do not know)

SPF cream was v expensive and horrible!

I think there will be a lot more sun damage in the generation born in the 1970s.

Yep, I used to burn & peel a lot. 17 years ago I had skin cancer - a ver aggressive malignant melanoma. The consultant said it was a result of childhood sunburns.
I still have scars from it being removed and the pain was horrendous. Luckily it hasn’t returned .

Born early 70's , never got sunburn as a child but we holidayed in the Lake district , so the Kagoul covered most of your skin ! My Mum is a fair/ginger type so didn't like being out in the midday sun, so I was indoors during the hottest parts of the day and we never went to the Seaside !
I can count on one hand the number of times I have been burnt in the past 50+ years, I always opt for the shade or will stay indoors, the worst sunburn I ever had was as a result of being in the Yorkshire Dales on a relatively breezy day, it just didn't feel hot due to the breeze.

Yes I'm fair-skinned and getting burnt was a common event, usually on holiday on the beach where we were out all day in the sun (never went abroad with my parents). But we also played out a lot at home so my arms etc didn't burn as much as my thighs when I was wearing swim wear at the beach. I've pulled strips of skin off my back too after falling asleep in the garden as a teen.

We did have suntan lotion but very low SPFs - 8 was considered too high as it was felt you wouid never get tanned if you used it. The aim was to tan and the downsides weren't talked about. Advice was also given to build up a tan before a holiday, by sunbathing for short periods regularly. Only actual burning was thought to be something to avoid.

However we didn't come to any harm. None of my family or childhood friends have developed skin cancer. Maybe our skin has aged more than it would otherwise have, though I've used moisturising cream with SPF for decades.