CAN YOU GET SUHSURNT?

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12776, 21 October 1919, Page 9

CAN YOU GET SUHSURNT?

Whenever I see a man go a fine brick-red after only an lionr or two iu the sun T say to myself, “That man’s a true-blooded Englishman.’’ Doctors, I believe, say that the degree to which a man gets sunburnt depends very much upon the thickness of his skin. If his skin be thin ho will bum more quickly and more deeply than he would if his skin were thick. That no doubt is true on the whole, but I am more than half inclined to think that race has something to do with the matter.

At any rate, I noticed, or thought I noticed, in those war-time days when hundreds of thousands of us were living in the open, that, in sunny weather, the Englishman took colour from the snn far more readily than a Frenchman or a Belgian or a Southern European, and that the more Saxon and less Celtic an Englishman was in looks the more fiercely red ho became.. Herein lies a theory which any man may work out according to his fancy, that tho Teutonic races are thickerskinned, in the physical sense, than the Celtic and the Latin. It is rather spoiled perhaps by the fact that few of us, I think, who were on the western front can remember to hj ; ve seen a sunburnt German. But then is the German quite such a Teuton as we have been apt to think him? Quito often he is almost wholly a Slav, and many Slavs are of sallow complexion. Nearly all the German prisoners were sallow. Sallow folk, as a rule, are dark, and we know that a fair man’s skin responds more quickly to the sun than does a dark man’s skin. Now, and Englishman is on the whole fair, or at any rata he should he, though in some cases he is not. The Lowland Scot, our schoolbooks used to. tell us, is the purest Saxon of 115 all, and perhaps in the aggregate the fairest of us all. He burns more, or rather he turns a brighter hue in the sun than does his Celtic cousin, the Highlander, who is often dark and swarthy and simply burns the darker. But enough of theories of sunburn. Midsummer and the week-end are the time for the practice of it. Let every man who can get out into the open and bring back with him, to brighten city streets and offices, a hearty, tanned face. Few know how easy it is, even for the city worker, to get tanned to the brows. Just bare the head and face the sun for two or three hours, and you will find yourself brown for the rest of the week —unless you be one of those dark, thick-skinned fellows who stay obstinately pale throughout tho brightest summer. —(Ralph Harold Brctherton, in the “ Daily Mail.”)