If you burn something in the oven, it cools down to regular temperature within a couple of hours, so what is it about sunburned skin that takes so long?
Is it an immune response to help prevent infection?
In: Biology
Sunburn isn’t a heat burn, it’s a radiation burn. Ultraviolet light is directly disabling/destroying skin cells on a chemical level with only minimal heating.
The damage then initiates the body’s typical mitigation and cleanup response – swelling, heat, tenderness.
All the heat comes from you, just like if you sprained an ankle and it swelled up. Hotter temperatures (within reason) accelerate your cell chemistry and disable some bacteria and viral chemistry so it’s a dual purpose process. Your crew works faster, possible invaders slow down.
Inflammation carries more blood to the area, and with more blood in the area, more body heat is lost through that region.
The heat you’re feeling would otherwise be spread across a much larger area as the capillaries wouldn’t be sending a ton of blood to that spot for inflammation.
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