by Juliette de Bairacli Levy

During sunbathing always protect the skin with a light application of oil, preferably herbal oil. Coconut oil thinned with vinegar or raw cucumber juice makes one of the best suntanning lotions. Also utilize the natural hours of sun tanning, which are the early morning and the late afternoon hours (this is the time that the animals like to sun themselves). The mid-morning and the mid-afternoon hours are burning, not tanning ones.

Take the trouble to find a secluded place where one can sunbathe the whole body. It is harmful to health to deprive parts of the body of sunlight, and I think that this social habit is one cause of breast and prostate cancer.

When one has to be out in the mid-day sun without any protection, in a hot climate, then copy the natives, who, when they have to cross treeless places in full sun heat, first cut themselves leafy braches or a big leaf such as a banana one, and make a primitive sunshade.

When I used to travel on horseback for long distances over sunburnt moorlands, on journeys to the gypsy horse fairs of the North of England, on days of fierce sun I use to put sprays of elder blossoms in my hat. This truly cooled the air: it was taught me by the horse trading Gypsies of the Pennine hills.

Elder blossom, meadowsweet, water-lilies, pulped raw cucumber and pulped dock leaves, all cool down and soothe the skin immediately, as does buttermilk and the whey from soured milk (the latter can be made immediately merely by adding to fresh milk a few spoons of raw lemon juice, or a teaspoon of the flowerets from a head of the globe artichoke).

In very severe sunburn, whites of eggs and honey can be used. (Egg whites when used in bad burns from fire, draw out heat so rapidly that they often become cooked upon the human skin!) The honey is a curative as well as cooling.