Did anyone else have parents who would toast themselves to a crisp every holiday?

[Imreallysnowedunder]

Another thread made me think of this. Both my mum and dad would go on holiday and just lie under a baking hot sun on the beach all day. Sometimes they’d briefly dip in the sea but the main portion of the day would be spent roasting.

They would both get extremely narky with me if I sought shade.

My mum and dad still do it!! Found them baking outside a pub today.

it’s bizarre cos my mum is white as fuck and burns like a bitch but my dad is not white and just chills like he’s not boiling to death.
im dark skinned and still boil to death

@Baggyeye the thing is I do easily go quite a nice colour, it’s not like I have especially pale colouring - so it’s basically that I’m not bright red and burnt to a crisp! 🙈

I have been basking today by the pool, cyclin.g and swimming, I have a beautiful golden tan. I look and feel super healthy and full of vitamin D. I feel sorry for those not making the most of the summer 😎

I am making the most of summer. This means not being red and sweaty and uncomfortable! I’m thoroughly enjoying the warmth, just not actually basking in intense heat all day.

My dad was like a rotisserie chicken.

He started fair, freckles and auburn hair. Ended up looking mahogany. I think the freckles just merged.

Several chunks been cut out of him in his sixties and seventies- skin cancer.

I have a similar colouring and was burnt like a barbecue sausage several times in my childhood.

My mum tells me that suncream wasn't invented in the 80s (I think she's wrong).

She is. I remember we had it in the 60s, but only for foreign holidays. Presumably, it wasn’t considered necessary in the UK.

It only became available in the UK in the sixties. It was sold in the chemist and was very expensive. Most people simply could not have afforded it except occasionally.

We have sun cream in the sixties and seventies and always used it on the beach (UK holidays then for us). It was nowhere near as good or effective as modern sun creams and, despite liberal applications of it and wearing a T shirt while we had our picnic, l remember still getting sunburned and the application of calamine lotion later on to alleviate the pain. My parents tried so hard to protect me from the sun but I am so extremely fair skinned that it was almost impossible then. I am very careful with high factor sun cream now.

*had

Hi DD. 😁

My parents didn’t but my Nan and grandad were ridiculous. We all pissed ourselves laughing when Benidorm came out, my man was 100% orange Madge with the cooking oil 😂

A 'lovely tan' is a sign your body is desperately trying to protect itself. It's an outward indication of damage.

I don’t see it that way, I see a tan as someone that has been enjoying the great outdoors! The skin naturally changes colour when in sun light. We are as humans dependent on being outside in all weathers - it’s incredibly healthy and vital to our bodies. As a result most drs will instruct people to put on sun cream after at least 15mins in the sun to give the body a chance to absorb vitamin D. Hating the sun, seeing a golden glow as damaging is an overreaction of a snowflake.

Get out and have fun and enjoy your lives not huddled in the dark and gloom.

Unfortunately skin cancer doesn’t agree with you @Festoonlights

I have been basking today by the pool, cyclin.g and swimming, I have a beautiful golden tan. I look and feel super healthy and full of vitamin D. I feel sorry for those not making the most of the summer 😎

I can “make the most of the summer” without damaging my skin. Factor 40 and light t-shirts. I have been swimming, cycling and walking.

i have lovely white undamaged skin. I look and feel super healthy and full of vitamin D from my diet and the minimal amount of strong sun needed.

i feel sorry for those who think a tan is super healthy and will age faster at best, see skin changes like hyperpigmentation, new moles and at worst in 20 years be in and out of dr’s clinics getting moles checked and a melanoma diagnosis.

It’s proven that sun exposure damages skin. A tan is not “lovely and healthy”, it’s a warning.

I think the view its "lovely and healthy" is definitely changing. Id see it as sun damage too .

FGS some people are SUCH drama llamas on MN.

You do realise there are millions of fair skinned people living in hot countries right?

@LydiaBennetsUglyBonnet quite a few posters on here, including myself, have mentioned that they have had older relatives with skin cancer. Not exactly drama llamas more realists

I don't think either parent was bothered about tanning for its own sake.. though there were rather a lot of bottles of fake tan, sun oil, make you go extra brown type stuff at home, suspect they were mothers and a bit of a fad rather than a lifelong thing.

My Mum went brown easily and rarely burned, my dad despite being strawberry blonde and uber-freckly, would go a bit red if he really over did it, but would then go brown, stay brown and not burn again.

My sister has to my knowledge, never burnt, certainly never as a child so I was a bit of a shock to them... I could burn in factor 25 which in the 80s wasn't so easy to get.

They did try.. but I got burnt through thin clothing, burnt on overcast days, I got burnt in February in the UK once! I got badly blistered in Brittany one year, and again in Cornwall 10 years later so now I keep a close eye on all moles and weird skin things, I've had one removed that turned out fine... but... mm!

These days I hide in the shade, very occasionally ill nip out for five minutes for a dose of vit D, but im back in before I can feel skin burning!

Fair, ginger Scot here. Daughter of sunworshippers with darker complexions.
We would holiday abroad every summer in the 80s and had the same experiences as described here. Dad never wore sunscreen, in fact we had an argument about this just last week. He was in the army, stationed in Libya and Cyprus for years in the 60s and apparently his sergeant major disallowed any form of sunscreen as it was for cissies. They were told they had to live like the locals who didn’t go around seeing protection from the sun. My dad still lives by these values to this day. So when we were on holiday in the 80s, he wouldn’t apply anything. Mum would use factor 4 for the first couple of days (to acclimatise) and then move to the carrot oil. I’d be left to my own devices.
We would sit by the pool or beach all day every day. I’d be responsible for checking the time so that mum could keep rolling over and ensure she was getting an even tan.

I remember, when new flights from the UK would arrive, a shout would go up from poolside “here come the milk bottles” and everyone would laugh at the newcomers with pale skin, next to our much more attractive bright red or deep mahogany shades. I frequently blistered and was in pain.
I remember once my legs got so burnt and blistered that I had to stay in bed for two days – I could barely walk. Of course all that happened was that the rest of the family jeered about all the lovely sun I was missing. Peeling was a competitive sport – we would peer strips off ourselves in the evenings – burning was a precursor to tanning and the more we peeled, the better the tan would be.
And the tan, of course, was just to show off to people back home that we had been away.

Mum and dad took things a step further and ended up moving abroad to one of their favourite holiday destinations. They still spend most of their days sitting in the sun, burning to a crisp and showing off their amazing healthy tans on video calls. Mum has had three lots of melanoma removed but says it’s nothing to worry about – it’s not proper cancer apparently, just a procedure that people in hot countries have to have from time to time. I’m terrified about the damage caused to my skin in early life but haven’t found anything to worry about yet.
Apart from the damaging aspects, as others have said, I just remember being so bored all the time. I can’t imagine spending weeks on end just lying still under intense heat. I do love the feeling of warmth on my skin but am fanatical about high factor sunscreen now (I wear spf on my face year round), as well as staying in the shade as much as possible. I also can’t cope with heat above 24 degrees.

You do realise there are millions of fair skinned people living in hot countries right?

you’ll know they’re all super careful with the sun then yes?

australia for example has such an epidemic of skin cancer they’ve had an active “slip slop slap” campaign for decades now. This has also been taken up by NZ and Canada.

i have relatives in a hot country and none sunbathe or tan. They spend most of their lives going from air conditioned house, to car, to work/school/mall. They all use high factor sun cream.

The not so fair skinned Spanish still Siesta to keep out of that afternoon danger zone.

fair skinned people in hot countries know the risks and also don’t see tans as “lovely and healthy”.

I have an Australian friend who’s a doctor. She’s told me that in Australia about ten of the moles I have would have been pre-emptively removed by a dermatologist. This is routinely done as the awareness of skin cancer is huge.

I've been musing on this overnight, and actually even though I was born in the 80s, my mum was always very careful not to let me get burnt. She'd never wear anything but oil and the tiniest of bikinis, but she'd slather me in sun cream, and in the hottest part of the day she'd make me cover up with a big t-shirt - no UV tops in those days!

I have vague memories of swimming in said t-shirt on holiday in Italy, and mum jokes that I came back paler than I'd left! She said she'd been terrified of me getting burnt because "me mam would've killed me if you had", so it was obviously something my grandma was aware of too, although that's maybe not surprising as she was a redhead who avoided the sun.

We didn't holiday abroad every year (couldn't afford it), but when we did it was always to hot places - Greece, Italy, South of France - and the only time I ever got burnt was in the UK. There seemed to be a misbelief that sun cream was only needed abroad! I don't remember ever being bored on foreign holidays either. Admittedly my mum was lucky in that I was an only child who liked my own company and loved reading and swimming, but we'd also swim together, take pedaloes or inflatables out, go for an explore, make friends with the locals (mum was very big on this, she'd lived abroad and hated the way a lot of holidaying Brits would be rude and unpleasant to the local people).

My childhood wasn't great in a lot of ways, but I have nothing but happy memories of those holidays.

No but I vividly recall seeing people doing this and how they looked, glistening in the sun and suggestive of a layer of wood stain.

My mum and her parents (only had one step of grandparents) were very sun averse. It always felt extreme at the time as mum would refuse to go out at all if it was very sunny, even into the garden and only acquiesce if there was ample shade. We always wore good sun cream and she covered us in it. There was always a large parasol up in the garden at my grandma's house and she'd have on a straw hat. Rather pointlessly really as they stayed inside anyway if it was hot.

I actually really like the sun but don't like to put my face in it for long and have never been burnt in my life (mid thirties) so the attitude obviously sunk in to some degree. The rest of them, including my sibling, still lurk around in the shadows like a suburban gollums if it's sunny, which always entertains.

But @Festoonlights what a lot of us are describing and still see is people lying in the sun especially on holiday with the higher UV rays from the sun and letting this happen to their skin. Nothing lovely or healthy about painful, damaging sunburn. Loads of this in Greece summer & probably here given the weather!

What lots of posters are advocating is being sensible in the sun & it seems like education in this regard has improved over the years.