These Incredible Photos Show Just What the Sun Does to Your Skin

Brooklyn-based photographer Cara Phillips has released a pretty chilling set of photographs, called 'Ultraviolet Beauties' that shed light on exactly what the sun does to our skin.

Of course, you know if you sit out in the sun you might come home with a red face (literally), but once the sunburn fades, it's often out of sight, out of mind for lots of us.

As Cara's photos show, mimicking medical photographs under an ultraviolet light, the damage done by the sun is often invisible to the naked eye.

These kinds of photos are popular with cosmetic doctors and some high street facial brands, as they display every speck of pigmentation and each spot spot or freckle in unflinching detail.

Cara didn't use UV light for these photos - she was able to get a similar effect with some camera wizardry, but looking at the speckled or in some cases, covered, faces of these people is pretty jaw-dropping.

Cara said on her website, 'While there is no guarantee this 'unseen' damage will ever show up on the skin, these images are used as tools to sell anti-ageing treatments...The resulting images are not to provoke by revealing the subject's sun damage, but to question the relevatory expectation of the photographic portrait. What can two-dimensional representation really capture about a person's interior?'

While Cara's right that there's no way of knowing how much of the damage will ever be visible on the skin's surface, these photos are kind of like looking into the future. Sun damage is very sneaky in that it can lie dormant for a long time before causing problems, whether that's just aesthetically or more seriously on a more medical level.

As thought-provoking as Cara's photos are, we're taking this as another stern reminder to dose up on the sunscreen and crucially - keep re-applying it throughout the day.

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