I am cursed/blessed (depending which way you look at it) with pale skin, which practically goes red in the full moon and tans so glacially it takes me an entire summer to darken as much as some of my friends do in a single afternoon.
One morning last summer I sat on my balcony to do some work, enjoying the outdoors and confident I was safe from sunburn because I was in total shade.
Except not long after, that dreaded red blotchiness started to spread across my chest, and within hours it had blossomed into a full-on (and moderately painful) burn. The lesson? Shade is no protection against mankind’s No.1 enemy: the sun.
That was proven by a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2017, which found that a beach umbrella is not a good substitute for sunscreen.
Researchers recruited 81 volunteers willing to risk a sunburn. All the men and women ranked somewhere between Type I and Type III on the Fitzpatrick scale, classification of human skin colour. To translate that into emoji, they all looked something like this:
(Fun fact: the different emoji skin tones are actually based on the Fitzpatrick scale.)
In the summer of 2014, the volunteers sat outdoors for three-and-a-half hours between 10 am and 2 pm, on the shores of Lake Lewisville in Texas. Even more cruelly, none of them were allowed in the water.
Half the volunteers applied an SPF 100 sunscreen all over bodies 15 minutes before the sun session and were instructed to reapply it at least every two hours. (FYI, there’s no evidence you need to bother with anything higher than SPF 30.)
The other half sat under a large beach umbrella.
RELATED: The 6 biggest sunscreen myths
Afterwards, the researchers examined regions of all the volunteers’ bodies — their faces, upper chests, the backs of their necks, and their arms and legs — and found that the umbrella group were significantly more likely to be sunburned, even though they’d huddled in the shade the whole time.
That’s probably because, while beach umbrellas do block direct UV rays that cause sunburn, they don’t block scattered or diffused UV rays. So you can get burned even if you stay in the shade.
RELATED: Why homemade sunscreen is a bad idea
And you can also get burned even if you wear sunscreen: the volunteers who slopped were not immune from sunburn (particularly on their faces — perhaps because less sunscreen is generally applied there or because sweat smears it off).
So the only sure-fire way to avoid sunburn is to… stay indoors.
“Umbrella shade alone may not provide sufficient protection for extended sun exposure,” said the study’s lead author Hao Ou-Yang, a doctor from Johnson & Johnson, which conducted the research (and is a sunscreen manufacturer).
“Although using SPF 100 was better than simply sitting in the shade, neither prevents sunburn completely. That’s why it’s essential to use a combination of sun protection methods.”