Sunburn, hydrogels & TermaBurn — answered by a dermatologist

It makes sense why it's been the go-to. If you think of aloe vera, it's kind of the original gel — you crack open the leaf and the gel is right there inside. We've been using it for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, before we knew how to manufacture these things. Aloe vera is also naturally an anti-inflammatory and a light antioxidant, so it accomplishes a lot of what we'd like to accomplish.

But a commercially available aloe gel is mostly water, and sometimes there's a little alcohol in it. It's not really a sustained delivery mechanism. You put the gel on and get a temporary soothing effect, but that water evaporates very quickly — and any alcohol in the product only hastens the evaporation. That's why it feels okay for 10 or 15 minutes, and then you're left with that filmy feeling: the water's gone and you're back to reapplying. That's why it comes in a big 32-ounce bottle — because it's not sustained.

A product like a hydrogel is much more of a sustained moisture barrier. The water is held inside, and it's a slow, trapped delivery mechanism that doesn't have to be reapplied every 10 or 15 minutes like an aloe gel.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's break down the classic methods. We talked about aloe vera gel — a lot of water content, but no real way to keep that water there. It's a quick delivery, and then you have to reapply it.

Creams, lotions, and ointments have varying degrees of oil content, increasing as you go from lotion to cream to ointment. Those are much more occlusive — they work less by delivering water and more by trapping it. With eczema patients, for example, we often have them soak in water before applying an ointment, so they trap that water in. But sometimes those can be a little too occlusive and clog pores.

On a burn, you want a two-way street — you want the water to move in and out, not just one way like it would with an ointment. If you apply something too occlusive after a burn, you can get clogged pores and a lot of other problems.

Soothing a sunburn and accelerating its recovery go hand in hand. What are you soothing? You want to cool it down — you feel hot when you have a sunburn — and you want to decrease the pain and the itch. We do that by cooling the skin and decreasing inflammation, because the pain and the itch are all mediated by inflammation. By decreasing the heat, you feel better, and you also slow down the heat-related cell death — and more cell death accelerates the whole process.

By decreasing the inflammation, you minimize the pain and itch, but you also decrease the inflammatory cascade that's furthering the cell death. So not only are you feeling better symptomatically — on a cellular level, you're actually slowing down the damage.

You're not reversing the damage — I want to be careful there. If DNA damage is done, it's done; the only thing that can really reverse that is your body's own DNA repair mechanisms. But you can slow it down. And that's the best thing you can do: intervene early and slow down that damage.

Intervening actually makes a difference — quick, effective intervention can make a real difference. Don't get the damage in the first place, because you can't fix that DNA. But have a good product on hand. The way TermaBurn is packaged, it's really easy to keep in a beach bag or in the cabinet at the beach house.

Recognize the burn happened — it happens to me, it happens to everybody. Get something on it quickly. It's effective, it's easy, it's low effort, and it actually makes a difference in terms of peeling and recovery — overall, in how quickly you can recover from that burn.