How to treat sunburn pain, according to skin experts

So you’re one of the 21 per cent of Australians who got sunburnt last weekend.

While we should be avoiding sunburn, it’s sometimes easier said than done in the Australian sun.

What can you do once you realise you’re turning into a temporary lobster?

First, the bad news

Once you’re sunburnt, you can’t undo the damage to your DNA and skin structures, and you can’t speed up skin healing. You can only treat the symptoms.

Sunburn is a radiation burn caused by too much exposure to ultraviolet (UV) rays, causing extensive damage to the DNA in your skin. When your skin’s DNA monitoring and repair system judges there’s too much damage to fix, it flags the cells for destruction and calls in the immune system to finish the job.

The immune cells and…