don't get the skin cancer
And I’m at a higher risk for skin cancer now (which I think I might have, i’ve got a few weird colored lesions, god I love living in America with no healthcare).
go get a biopsy. now. even if you don't have money for it. you don't want cancer to metastasize and spread to other organs
not even biopsy necessarily, dermatologists are really good at telling benign skin shit from the really dangerous ones just by looking at them (and they WILL biopsy if they think its sus)
go now, if they get shit early its just a case of a pretty small chop but leaving it is incredibly bad
medical debt can be ignored for years
cancer can't
even if you can't afford it, it'll cost so much more to ignore it, if it really is cancer. i have no good answers for you except maybe try to get hooked up with a mutual aid group or start a crowd fund or talk to some extended family
if nothing else, go to a general practitioner and have them look at all the shit on your skin. in a mayo country theyll likely be pretty practiced at telling whether any of them need a dermatologists eye or whether theyre just the weird skin shit everyone has. there might also be free skin-check clinics around you. and getting a small surface lesion that hasnt invaded deeply cut off will not be cheap but wont be lifetime-of-debt territory
and if it is something more serious, there are clinical trials running all the time, and a lot of them are in practice more like access programs for established treatments (but with something new thrown on top) than they are guinea pig shit (theyre the sort of thing pretty much everyone with bad cancer should consider regardless of money)
UK here, out of interest as I don't really have perspective or experience on this, how much are they?
No shit you should get that checked out, seriously. Skin cancer is curable if you catch it early but it is very deadly if you let it go
God that sounds like it fucking sucked. Reminds me that there's a good reason most premodern cultures basically covered their whole body regardless of climate - we can get away with showing off skin now only because we spend so much more time indoors.
really do not feel like white people were meant to be anywhere other than europe/ maybe the arctic circle. its a catastrophe that i have to exist in america as a pale person, i burn in 10 minutes here. whenever im in czechia i feel like the sun isnt actively trying to kill me
i feel like an actual vampire, bound to my native land and shit, and i get burned by the sun here lmfao
Someone should make a horror movie where white colonizers are the monsters
For perspective, Paris is on the same latitude line as St. John's, Newfoundland; Manchester, UK is on the same lattitude as Edmonton, Alberta; Rome is the same as New York City; and Miami, Florida is roughly the same as Ghat, Libya or Medina, Saudi Arabia.
Asia is okay too for how rainy and plant-grown it is. I would love to go somewhere more like that once I can escape from my current sun-fried concrete neoliberal hell
We did literally evolve for that. I got some desert dna but my wife doesn't. She can't be outside during peak summer or she will get a heatstroke and start puking but she can just frolic in the high desert night
Brown comrades too. Having dark skin doesn't provide meaningful protection against skin cancer.
Also White Drs. are racist and often don't notice or don't know how to diagnose skin cancer on dark skin so take that in to account if you have concerns.
Having dark skin doesn’t provide meaningful protection against skin cancer.
and also a large proportion of the (smaller number of) melanomas that non-white people do get are not actually sun-related either
Tip for my fellow usamerican comrades with sensory issues and can't fucking stand sunscreen: American sunscreen is ass. AFAIK The FDA hasn't approved new sunscreen ingredients in decades, so we've still got all that foul-smelling thick pasty goop from like the 80s.
Less-hellscapey countries have made a lot of progress on sunscreen in the meantime. In particular there are a lot of Asian sunscreens that feel much lighter (i.e. don't feel like you've got that paste layer on your skin at all), don't have that strong sunscreen scent, rub in easier, and are way more pleasant to use than anything you'll find in america.
Edit: I've had good luck with Korean and Japanese sunscreens in particular. One I've enjoyed before is biore watery essence. My wife keeps up with skincare stuff way better than I do though so I can ask her about other kinds when she's off work.
I would love to know if your wife knows any other decent brands! I struggle really bad with sunscreen, it's a sensory nightmare ugh
I wound up texting her about it an hour ago since I remembered we were almost out of sunscreen anyway lol.
She reaffirmed that the Biore UV aqua rich watery essence is still among the best for sensory issues. In my experience it's been incredible, I've struggled with basically lotions and creams and other skincare goos my whole life, sunscreen worst of all — I have zero problems with that one, it doesn't feel like anything, isn't greasy, doesn't have a white cast, doesn't sting if it gets in my eyes, and very importantly doesn't have much of a scent (iirc it has a faint, mild smell that doesn't smell anything like american sunscreen and goes away relatively quickly). The drawback is that it can be a little pricey, so it's better kept as a face-only sunscreen.
Otherwise, she sent me this sunscreen thread from the subreddit for asian skincare products and assured me that I could let my eyes glaze over at the ingredients if I wanted and just read the bullet points for the descriptions of how they feel and smell. From the thread it sounds like Kose Suncut, Nivea Sun, and Canmake Mermaid are good. I think pilling is mostly something that happens when you use multiple kinds of skincare products together, but I'm not 100% sure (i don't use anything other than sunscreen and it's never happened to me)
thank you both so much!!! this is honestly going to help me a lot
totally, very much understand the struggle and happy to help! hope you find one you like, good luck!
Sunburn is an inflammatory response in the tissue triggered by direct DNA damage by UV radiation. When the cells' DNA is overly damaged by UV radiation, type I cell-death is triggered and the tissue is replaced.
The more damage that is done the higher the chance those replacements cells are going to become malignant though.
speaking specifically of melanomas though, of the ones that are on cutaneous skin the majority appear to be related to acute sun damage - ie mayos who live their lives mostly indoor going out to the beach or wherever and getting fried (there are a subset related to chronic sun damage, though they have a somewhat different profile). and even a few instances of sunburn under the age of 18 is particularly correlated with melanoma later in life. yes some/many damaged cells may die off (either by triggered apoptosis or just necrosis from all the damage), but a lot will accumulate damage that doesnt trigger responses. but the problem is not just uv causing dna damage that triggers proliferative pathways but that it also causes dna damage that knocks out the cell death mechanisms when the damage is great enough to trigger the kill switch, and it doesnt have to be in many cells. if youve fucked up your skin enough that its sunburnt, youve done some bad damage that cell death and the inflammatory cleanup response wont fix
apoptosis? more like hey, pop two beers in the cooler sis :grillman:
on the one hand, there is some sort of cosmic irony in pasty white settler colonists coming to sunnier lands and benefiting from the genocide of the indigenous people whose lands theyve stolen, and then having their own pigment cells rise up in revolt and choking them to death from the inside on their own melanin for their hubris
on the other hand ive worked with too many people with stage iv melanoma and it sucks so incredibly badly so please be careful my fellow mayos
i dont disagree about non-white comrades wearing sunscreen, but honestly even relatively small amounts of pigment are actually massively protective
yeah, us honkies out in the sun are practically standing in front of the Elephant's Foot
Usually SPF-15 is enough even for me, and I'm just :anti-italian-action:
Real talk: if you're white (honestly everyone), you should be at least putting sunscreen on your face if you have any kind of sun exposure daily. Anything exposed would be better, but the long term damage to your skin is going to age you a lot faster.
Ok that note, moisturizing is absolutely amazing for keeping your skin looking younger longer. You may think I'm being annoying now but this is something that becomes obvious once you hit your thirties and you start recognizing the difference between your peers who took care of their skin and those who didn't.
How to i actually take care of my skin?
So much of the products promoted seem like a total grift.
What does an actually effective skin care look like?
What about vitamin d in natural form (plus you won't make it through sunscreen), coenzime Q10 (for it's synthesis in sun you need chlorofile in your blood = eat anything green 1-2h prior), a bunch of other "chemical" things and proven psychological benefits of sun exposure (very likely connected to the aforementioned biochemistry) - as opposed to cosmetics and skin "age"?
I am sunbathing systematically 10-15-20 min daily depending on UV index/time of year/day (plus say, for chlorophile/CoenzimeQ10 I drink a cup of macha) while using any cover in the meantime = hat/glasses/sunscreen/banal walking faster and/or on shady side of street etc.)
Sort of related, I’m tempted to go on chud forums and encourage dudes to sun their balls without sunscreen, since that already seems to be a thing for some reason.
After reading how many more infections my government is expecting this year and then doubling it to get the real number, I've decided to forego skin exposure entirely and kill two birds with one stone by just building a covid helmet
