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[music] Hello, I’m Dr. Neal Schultz
[pause]
and welcome to DermTV.
After our skin gets sunburn, it turns tan. No, the reason we turn tan is
not because God wants us to be beautiful, the reason we turn tan is because
this is the body’s defensive mechanism to decrease additional sun damage.
When we turn tan we make more melanin in the skin and melanin is a very
good sunscreen. It really helps to absorb ultraviolet energy, and this is
your body’s way of adapting to the damage and trying to decrease additional
damage from additional ultra-violet radiation. Natural extension of this
issue is, if someone has a lot of melanin pigment in their skin, do they
need to wear sunscreen? So, I’m often questioned by African Americans with
skin tones from light to dark whether or not they need to wear sunscreen
and the answer is Yes, that they do. A medium toned African American skin
color actually has a natural UVB protection of between 13 and 16 SPF. That
means there’s protection against 80-90% of the UVB light. We also believe
that that same melanin protects against a lot of UVA radiation. Although we
don’t have as good of numbers on a quantitative analysis, we do know though
that African American seems to photo-age much later and much more slowly
than Caucasian skin. But the bottom line is, while there is moderate sun
protection by the extra melanin pigment, there’s not complete protection
and since sun damage is really based on an accumulation of small amounts of
damage, even African Americans need to wear sunscreen to completely protect
themselves or maximally protect themselves from the photo-aging effects of
ultra violet and from the skin cancer causing effects of ultra-violet
light.