Cancer Council Queensland

Daniel talks about sun protection for outdoor workers.

DANIEL:

I guess I pay a lot of attention to being sun safe, especially working in a trade. We always have safety gear on, long sleeves, long pants, always have a hard hat or something on. I guess I sort of have to pay a lot of attention to sun safety.

What makes me pay attention? Well there are a lot of ads on TV about skin cancer. With a trade, well my boss is always trying to get us to wear the safety gear, which in itself is sun safe as well.

How do I? Well with working everyday we’ve got the long shirts, long pants, boots, we normally wear some sort of hat, even those ones with the flap on the back. So, we are pretty well covered. And gloves as well if we are doing any dangerous work, so we’re pretty covered the whole time, it’s good.

I guess any time you are outdoors, any sports you are doing, like my mates chuck the footy around on the weekend. So you’ve definitely got to try and be the most sun safe, because that could affect your work for next week if you get too sun burnt or something. So, I guess anytime you are outside, but then just going into the shops or something you don’t need to bother. But if you are going to the beach, you need to put on the sunscreen.

I think there are good advertisements and knowledge when you are young and you get told to wear all the stuff, so it’s pretty engraved in our generation. I guess the sun can do quite a bit of damage to your skin.

My dad told me a story when I was younger about him getting blisters on top of his sunburn one day after going out in the sun with no shirt or sunscreen on, back along time ago, and it blistered for a week and resulted in pretty bad damage.

I guess when we go to the beach we always get sun burnt. We do the precautions of putting sunscreen on, but it always washes off after you go for a swim. I guess the major sunburn I get is on the top of my ears due to me having short hair. It’s usually not too bad, but sometimes I can get pretty badly burnt.

Do I think people with a tan are more attractive? I don’t think it has a huge effect. Like I was saying before about the people that go out purposely to get a tan, I think they look a bit silly, you know if they are trying to be that brown or bronzed. It’s not necessary I think.

My favourite piece of sun protective clothing is probably my flano I am wearing underneath this. It covers everything, it’s nice and cosy and in winter it is nice and warm. Apart from that, my sunnies probably. I always have them on.

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