Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook: les Hashtags #suntatoo or @burnlineare followed by it. People, often young, show the stigma of an overexposure to the sun. They made an often simple drawing on their body with their sunscreen, so that the sunburn spares this area. Consequence: after long hours of exposure, a flower or a smiley is emerged on the skin. Sometimes it’s just the trace of a collar or a bikini top. Here, the imagination is matched only by recklessness.
“I can hear that we want to make the buzzreacts Professor Jean-François Beaurin, also a medical oncologist and responsible for the melanoma clinic and skin tumors of Saint-Luc university clinics, But it’s taking risks“.
These acute and intermittent sun exposures are indeed the most important risk factor: “The younger you are, the more acute there are, the more dangerous it is. 80% of these skin cancers – singularly melanomas – are linked to overexposure to the sun“Adds the specialist.
These practices are not recent, but social networks offer them a major resonance fund. Dermatologists have thus seen several waves of overexposed people dangerously in the sun pass: the children of the “colonial” Belgians whose skin did not include enough melatonin to be exposed regularly or intensely in the sun in Africa, or the wave of solariums to sunbathe, in net decline.
And today, globalization helping, continues Jean-François Beaurin, “oAssists in the wave linked to inexpensive travel to tropical countries where people are very much exposed to the sun“.