Idledame
Practically Family
- Messages
- 897
- Location
- Lomita (little hill) California
As far as ordinary people and sunscreen go, my parents were in their teens and 20's in the 20's and 30s. They told me it was the fad to write things on your skin in iodine before going to the beach. Then when you got home the iodine would wash/wear off and leave the message in untanned skin. When I was growing up in the 50's there was still no such thing as sunblock. Everyone just burned and peeled over and over all summer. When I was a teenager in the 60's we used baby oil which was supposed to give a richer tan. Pale people would mix iodine in with the baby oil to make them look more tan though it must have kept me paler based on how my parents used it. I never thought of that then! Self tanners that turned you orange came out in the 60's. When they did come out with sunblock, it was greasy and you would sweat it right off. I was a letter carrier and I think I didn't start using sun block daily until maybe the 80's when they started to make some that wasn't greasy. Sun block and fear of cancer/aging is really relatively recent.