8 ms·

What’s funny is before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you. Laura Ingalls Wilder of Lit

by wincy 28d ago

What’s funny is before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you. Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame (I mention this a lot as I read these to my children as an adult, and they’re a fascinating look at 1880s America) has lots of places where her mother says “put on your bonnet! Don’t get too much sun!”. We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, all of Chesterton’s fences were torn down during that time period.

hibikir 28d ago
We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging. So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)
- dylan604 28d ago
  > We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. I thought you were going to talk about the ingredients in the cream were carcinogenic themself.
- pazimzadeh 28d ago
  technically UVB is much more tanning than UVA. UVA tans for a short amount of time. UVA penetrates much deeper into the skin though and has few benefits (UVB stimulates Vitamin D synthesis).
ViktorRay 28d ago
No I think you’re looking at this wrong. They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside. They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up. There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.
- SoftTalker 28d ago
  Pretty sure a bad sunburn sucked back then as much as now, and was something one tried to avoid.
  - bluGill 28d ago
    Unless you are albino (which is a large set of other problems) being in the sun all day will develop enough of a tan that you won't sunburn. There might be a problem in spring, but by summer time most people will have spent enough time outdoors that they wouldn't sunburn. I've always been the lightest person in town (a tie in Stockholm) and I can spend all day outside without any sunscreen and I won't burn on the parts of my body normally not covered (my arms), but other parts would burn in a few minutes (If I took off my hat or shirt...)
    - foco_tubi 28d ago
      I don’t think this is correct, Black people still get sunburns
      - bluGill 28d ago
        Black people who spend all their time indoors or covered up will get sunburned if they go outside. If that black person gradually increases their sun exposure they can (in a few weeks) reach the point where they can be outside without sunscreen and they will not get sun burned. Note that I'm making no claims on how natural sunburn resistant affects skin cancer.
        foco_tubi 28d ago
        Increased melanin provides some protection against burns, but it doesn’t make you immune. There’s also the aspect of UV damage without burns, which is still harmful and is not affected by melanin levels.
        28d ago
quickthrowman 28d ago
> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.
jihadjihad 28d ago
> before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you. I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure. Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy#History
- kaikai 28d ago
  When I got chickenpox in the 80s my grandma made me sit out in the sun to heal it faster. Heliotherapy lives on!
- kstrauser 28d ago
  In retrospect, I wonder if there was a measurable effect on sun exposure creating vitamin D => immune system recovery, especially if the patient were otherwise not outside much? Like, I doubt that fixing a vitamin D deficiency is going to cure you of smallpox or TB, but could imagine a path where it helped at least.
kstrauser 28d ago
I don't think that was because of UV exposure or anything related. Look at Bedouin tribes even today. They wrap up head to toe, man and woman and child alike, not to avoid tanning but because prolonged exposure to direct infrared will fry you like an egg. I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.
- raverbashing 28d ago
  Bedouins are literally being chargrilled from both sides, the worse sun on Earth and a mostly perfectly infrared accumulator below them
raverbashing 28d ago
Everybody who's not been raised in a bubble knows the sun burns It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"
- dfee 28d ago
  > It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer" but, what if staying in the sun isn't binary? and, what if everyday products did cause cancer? https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/cancer-concerns-from-everyday-products https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/cancer-concerns-from-e...
- pazimzadeh 28d ago
  the idea that any amount of sun is bad for you is what is retarded https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4 https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupational-uv-exposure-HBp8SnH https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupatio...
tialaramex 28d ago
That's the right thing for the wrong reason, which can actually significantly forestall figuring out what's actually going on. Scurvy is like that. They figured out that if you give sailors a ration of fresh fruit juice they don't get scurvy - this works because the fresh fruit juice has Vitamin C and Scurvy is just Vitamin C deficiency. But they didn't know why it worked - why would a cow, a mango, a lettuce, and indeed basically everything else have a chemical in it that humans can't synthesize ? That's crazy. Except, nope, that's really what's going on. At some point an ancestor deleted the synthesis pathway for this chemical, their offspring weren't bothered because fresh literally everything has the chemical anyway, so the deletion stuck around. At the same time ships get quite a lot faster, travel across the Atlantic is now rapid enough that even if you deliberately abstained from Vitamin C you wouldn't get scurvy, your body hoards many chemicals it needs (a few must be made "fresh" but most can be hoarded) and only develops issues when the hoarded ascorbic acid is exhausted after a few weeks. But they don't know that, and so when they swap a working solution (store fruit, squeeze the juice out, drink fresh juice) for a non-working solution (squeeze the juice, preserve that, drink preserved juice) the apparent results do not change. Until they do something more extreme. Go to Antarctica, which is incredibly hostile to life anyway, and then stay there for months. Despite your magic preserved fruit juice you get scurvy. The juice wasn't magic, and eventually you will figure out it was the freshness which was magic and from there that there really is a chemical found in cows, mango, lettuce and basically everything alive which we cannot synthesize. Ascorbic acid, Vitamin C.
dzhiurgis 28d ago
In many places covering up is just not enough because of Rayleigh scattering. I don't think this vaccine eliminates need for sunscreen. You'd still feel extremely uncomfortable/pain after 15 minutes in places like Australia even if you don't get melanoma.

by wincy 28d ago

hibikir 28d ago

We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging. So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)

dylan604 28d ago
> We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. I thought you were going to talk about the ingredients in the cream were carcinogenic themself.
pazimzadeh 28d ago
technically UVB is much more tanning than UVA. UVA tans for a short amount of time. UVA penetrates much deeper into the skin though and has few benefits (UVB stimulates Vitamin D synthesis).

ViktorRay 28d ago

No I think you’re looking at this wrong. They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside. They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up. There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.

SoftTalker 28d ago
Pretty sure a bad sunburn sucked back then as much as now, and was something one tried to avoid.
- bluGill 28d ago
  Unless you are albino (which is a large set of other problems) being in the sun all day will develop enough of a tan that you won't sunburn. There might be a problem in spring, but by summer time most people will have spent enough time outdoors that they wouldn't sunburn. I've always been the lightest person in town (a tie in Stockholm) and I can spend all day outside without any sunscreen and I won't burn on the parts of my body normally not covered (my arms), but other parts would burn in a few minutes (If I took off my hat or shirt...)
  - foco_tubi 28d ago
    I don’t think this is correct, Black people still get sunburns
    - bluGill 28d ago
      Black people who spend all their time indoors or covered up will get sunburned if they go outside. If that black person gradually increases their sun exposure they can (in a few weeks) reach the point where they can be outside without sunscreen and they will not get sun burned. Note that I'm making no claims on how natural sunburn resistant affects skin cancer.
      - foco_tubi 28d ago
        Increased melanin provides some protection against burns, but it doesn’t make you immune. There’s also the aspect of UV damage without burns, which is still harmful and is not affected by melanin levels.
        28d ago

quickthrowman 28d ago

> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.

jihadjihad 28d ago

> before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you. I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure. Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy#History

kaikai 28d ago
When I got chickenpox in the 80s my grandma made me sit out in the sun to heal it faster. Heliotherapy lives on!
kstrauser 28d ago
In retrospect, I wonder if there was a measurable effect on sun exposure creating vitamin D => immune system recovery, especially if the patient were otherwise not outside much? Like, I doubt that fixing a vitamin D deficiency is going to cure you of smallpox or TB, but could imagine a path where it helped at least.

kstrauser 28d ago

I don't think that was because of UV exposure or anything related. Look at Bedouin tribes even today. They wrap up head to toe, man and woman and child alike, not to avoid tanning but because prolonged exposure to direct infrared will fry you like an egg. I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.

raverbashing 28d ago
Bedouins are literally being chargrilled from both sides, the worse sun on Earth and a mostly perfectly infrared accumulator below them

raverbashing 28d ago

Everybody who's not been raised in a bubble knows the sun burns It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"

dfee 28d ago
> It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer" but, what if staying in the sun isn't binary? and, what if everyday products did cause cancer? https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/cancer-concerns-from-everyday-products https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/cancer-concerns-from-e...
pazimzadeh 28d ago
the idea that any amount of sun is bad for you is what is retarded https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4 https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupational-uv-exposure-HBp8SnH https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupatio...

tialaramex 28d ago

That's the right thing for the wrong reason, which can actually significantly forestall figuring out what's actually going on. Scurvy is like that. They figured out that if you give sailors a ration of fresh fruit juice they don't get scurvy - this works because the fresh fruit juice has Vitamin C and Scurvy is just Vitamin C deficiency. But they didn't know why it worked - why would a cow, a mango, a lettuce, and indeed basically everything else have a chemical in it that humans can't synthesize ? That's crazy. Except, nope, that's really what's going on. At some point an ancestor deleted the synthesis pathway for this chemical, their offspring weren't bothered because fresh literally everything has the chemical anyway, so the deletion stuck around. At the same time ships get quite a lot faster, travel across the Atlantic is now rapid enough that even if you deliberately abstained from Vitamin C you wouldn't get scurvy, your body hoards many chemicals it needs (a few must be made "fresh" but most can be hoarded) and only develops issues when the hoarded ascorbic acid is exhausted after a few weeks. But they don't know that, and so when they swap a working solution (store fruit, squeeze the juice out, drink fresh juice) for a non-working solution (squeeze the juice, preserve that, drink preserved juice) the apparent results do not change. Until they do something more extreme. Go to Antarctica, which is incredibly hostile to life anyway, and then stay there for months. Despite your magic preserved fruit juice you get scurvy. The juice wasn't magic, and eventually you will figure out it was the freshness which was magic and from there that there really is a chemical found in cows, mango, lettuce and basically everything alive which we cannot synthesize. Ascorbic acid, Vitamin C.

dzhiurgis 28d ago

In many places covering up is just not enough because of Rayleigh scattering. I don't think this vaccine eliminates need for sunscreen. You'd still feel extremely uncomfortable/pain after 15 minutes in places like Australia even if you don't get melanoma.