Sun's effect on skin

The skin uses sunlight to help manufacture vitamin D, which is important for normal bone formation. But there’s a downside. The sun's ultraviolet light can cause major damage to the skin. The outer layer of the skin has cells that contain the pigment melanin. Melanin protects skin from the sun's ultraviolet rays. These can burn the skin and reduce its elasticity, leading to premature aging.

People tan because sunlight causes the skin to produce more melanin and darken. The tan fades when new cells move to the surface and the tanned cells are sloughed off. Some sunlight can be good as long as you have proper protection from overexposure. But too much ultraviolet, or UV, exposure can cause sunburn. The UV rays penetrate outer skin layers and hit the deeper layers of the skin, where they can damage or kill skin cells.

People, especially those who don’t have much melanin and who sunburn easily, should protect themselves. You can protect yourself by covering sensitive areas, wearing sunblock, limiting total exposure time, and avoiding the sun between 10 am and 2 pm.

Frequent exposure to ultraviolet rays over many years is the chief cause of skin cancer. And skin cancer should not be taken lightly.

Check your skin regularly for suspicious growths or other skin changes. Early detection and treatment are key in the successful treatment of skin cancer.

Sun's effect on skin

Bookmark

Review Date: 8/2/2025

Reviewed By: Ramin Fathi, MD, FAAD, Director, Phoenix Surgical Dermatology Group, Phoenix, AZ. Also reviewed by David C. Dugdale, MD, Medical Director, Brenda Conaway, Editorial Director, and the A.D.A.M. Editorial team.

The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, timeliness, or correctness of any translations made by a third-party service of the information provided herein into any other language.

© 1997- A.D.A.M., a business unit of Ebix, Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.

All content on this site including text, images, graphics, audio, video, data, metadata, and compilations is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may view the content for personal, noncommercial use. Any other use requires prior written consent from Ebix. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, publish, reverse-engineer, adapt, modify, store beyond ordinary browser caching, index, mine, scrape, or create derivative works from this content. You may not use automated tools to access or extract content, including to create embeddings, vectors, datasets, or indexes for retrieval systems. Use of any content for training, fine-tuning, calibrating, testing, evaluating, or improving AI systems of any kind is prohibited without express written consent. This includes large language models, machine learning models, neural networks, generative systems, retrieval-augmented systems, and any software that ingests content to produce outputs. Any unauthorized use of the content including AI-related use is a violation of our rights and may result in legal action, damages, and statutory penalties to the fullest extent permitted by law. Ebix reserves the right to enforce its rights through legal, technological, and contractual measures.