Nobody likes getting a sunburn.
Your skin turns red, burns and even feels hot to the touch.
Intuitively, you know you want to cool down, not heat up. But you also know that the sauna provides a host of benefits for the skin. Will the sauna help or hurt your sunburn?
When you have a sunburn, you should avoid the sauna, steam room, the hot tub, or anything else that will heat the skin. You should be cooling the skin with cold compresses, cold showers and cold baths.
In this article, I will explain various reasons why you should not use the sauna after getting a sunburn. Then I will offer some helpful tips for treating your sunburn.
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Normally the Sauna is great for the skin, but it’s not when you have a sunburn.
The sauna provides many benefits for the skin:
- Increased blood flow. The sauna causes your blood vessels to expand and more blood to flow to the skin. Your blood delivers nutrients, oxygen, and cells from your immune system to the skin. This will cause your skin to look younger and healthier–like you just applied a good moisturizer.
- Opens pores. When you use the sauna, your pores open up and you sweat. This allows dirt and toxins that are trapped in your skin to escape.
- Increased strength and elasticity. Heat exposure causes your body to produce more of a protein called collagen. Your body uses collagen to provide structure to your skin, making it stronger and more elastic.
While normally a good thing, increased blood flow and open pores can be detrimental when you have a sunburn. Increased blood flow can make blisters worse and even cause bleeding.
Open pores can also allows irritants in, which is not what you want when your skin is in a sensitive and vulnerable condition.
Using the Sauna with a Sunburn Can Cause Dehydration
As we’ve warned before, you should avoid using sauna when you have a condition which makes you more susceptible to dehydration. Sunburned skin is one such condition.
The fact that you have a sunburn means you were likely in the sun and sweating, and thus, already likely to be somewhat dehydrated. Once your skin is burned, body water is more likely to evaporate out of your skin cells–leaving your skin dry and your entire body dehydrated.
Using the sauna after getting a sunburn is basically like doubling down on dehydration.
Instead, you should be doing the opposite. Stay out of the sun. Stay out of the sauna. Avoid anything that causes you to sweat. And drink plenty of fluids.
Sauna Can Make Blisters Worse (or even cause them)
As discussed previously, when you are exposed to the heat of the sauna, your blood vessels expand. Blood flow throughout your body, including your skin, increases. Normally this is great for your general health. Unfortunately this is not the case when you have a sunburn, especially a sunburn that is blistering.
Sunburns cause inflammation. This means that increased blood flow and other fluids are already flooding the area. If enough fluids accumulate in the inflamed tissue, blisters will form.
Using the sauna and causing blood vessels to dilate further will only send more fluids to the already inflamed skin. Doing so can cause blisters to rupture and capillaries to break, creating red patches and spider veins. In should come as no surprise that using the sauna will make blisters worse.
What may be a little more surprising is that heat exposure can sometimes elevate a sunburn, which hasn’t blistered, and actually cause blisters to occur. There have been instances where a person with a normal, non-blistering sunburn has entered the sauna only to find afterward, that blisters have started to form.
Sunburns Increase Your Skin’s Sensitivity and Vulnerability
Healthy hydrated layers of skin protect the body from bacteria and various other irritants. When you get a sunburn, this protective layer is damaged, making skin more sensitive and vulnerable to irritants and bacteria.
For this reason, you should be extra wary about exposing yourself to bacteria or chemicals which might further irritate your skin. Avoid perfumes and colognes. Avoid bath salts and oils.
Avoid shaving sunburned skin as you will physically irritate the skin and possibly introduce bacteria.
Similarly, don’t scrub your sunburn. After washing, be sure to use a clean towel to gently dab dry your skin.
Steam Rooms and Hot Tubs Are Similarly Bad for a Sunburn
If you shouldn’t use the sauna until after your sunburn has healed. Then this is doubly so with regards to using the steam room or hot tub.
First of all, just like the sauna, steam rooms and hot tubs will further heat your skin. This will be uncomfortable. You should be cooling the skin with cool water from cold compresses, cool showers and cool baths.
Also, like the sauna, the heat from a steam room or jacuzzi will cause you to sweat, increasing the risks of dehydration. Likewise, it will increase blood flow and further inflame already inflamed tissue.
They can be even worse for your sunburn than the sauna, because the wet element, make the steam room and sauna even more likely to harbor bacteria.
The bottom line is that you should avoid the steam room and the hot tub when you have a sunburn because the heat will cause you discomfort and increase inflammation, while the water and steam will expose vulnerable sunburned skin to bacteria.
Tips for Treating a Sunburn
- Apply Cold Compresses. Get a cold damp towel and press it on your sunburned skin for about 10 minutes. This will cool the skin and provide needed pain relief. You can do this multiple times per day as needed.
- Take cold showers and baths. They don’t have to be ice cold, but you can also cool the skin with a bath or shower using cool or lukewarm water.
- Apply Aloe Vera. The clear gel found inside aloe vera plants has been shown to be beneficial to the healing process and can also help to moisturize sunburned skin. Conveniently, this gel has been incorporated into many over-the-counter creams.
- Take an NSAID. NSAIDs, or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, can be used to reduce inflammation and pain. Aspirin and Ibuprofen are two common, over-the-counter- NSAID’s. Do not exceed dosage recommended on the bottle.
