Whatever skin type or skin color, everybody is prone to sunburn from spending too much time under the sun. When exposed to UV rays, it doesn’t take long for the skin to begin to “burn”. It can be as mild as a slight itch to actual peeling.

There are a lot of different treatments for sunburns – both medical and natural. The most important thing you can do with either a medical or natural treatment is to act fast. You do not want to wait and damage your skin more. It’s important that you put some salve onto it as soon as possible.

Below are some great natural do-it-yourself treatments to alleviate itchy and painful sunburns:

Apricot Anti-Itch Salve:
1. Get an apricot or two, depending on how wide the sunburned area is. Soften the apricots by letting it sit in warm water for 5 minutes.
2. As it gets soft, peel the skin gently. Then mash the apricots in a bowl.
3. Add a little bit of honey, just a teaspoon will do. Mix well with the mashed apricots.
4. Apply the salve on the sunburned area. Rinse off with warm water after 15 minutes.

Yogurt-and-Cucumber Moisturizing Treatment
This home remedy is really great for those lighter burns. Yogurt has wonderful enzymes and acids that are great to treat dry, irritated skin. Cucumber can nourish the sunburned skin, and has that cooling effect you will love.
1. Simply clean the sunburned area with lukewarm water, pat very gently with cotton to dry.
2. Get half a cucumber and peel the skin out. Take the seeds out and mash the cucumber in a blender until it’s a paste.
3. In a small bowl, pour the cucumber paste and add plain yogurt. Mix well.
4. Spread it evenly across the damaged skin. Let it sit for 20 minutes or until the cucumber’s cooling effect fades.

For Inflamed Sunburned Skin:
If you’re having trouble with heavy redness on your sunburn, you can simply take a cool shower to help the outer layer of the skin cool down a bit. Be sure not to use ice on sunburned skin, as ice has an extremely cold temperature that could also shock the skin. A slight, cooling bag would suffice.

Gentle Skin Peeling Treatment:
When it comes to helping the skin peel naturally, there’s nothing that works as well as Tea Tree Oil. Imagine a sunburned area of skin where you see little dry, flaky patches of peeing skin that doesn’t seem to go away. With the use of a Tea Tree Oil solution, you can speed up the peeling progress.

1. Get a small container ready, tea tree oil, a bottle, a tablespoon of extravirgin olive oil and square cotton swabs.
2. In the container, mix in the two oils 1:2, tea tree oil and olive oil respectively
3. Moisten the cotton and apply it to the peeling oil

When it comes to caring for your sunburned skin, cooling and lessening the irritation of the skin is your outmost priority. The best thing is to keep the area moisturized and hydrated! That means drink lots of water.

As long as you avoid putting strong, acidic ointments on the skin you should be fine. Some advice I’ve seen is kind of scary, involving toothpaste too supposedly cool the skin, which is wrong. The mint in the toothpaste does not cool the skin, but burns it even more. Don’t use apple cider vinegar, either. ACV is considered a cure-all but in this case it will do more harm than good. The worse kind of sunburn would be one where the skin looks oddly shiny and blistering, so if it gets to this point, I suggest bandaging it up and going to your dermatologist and have your doctor take a look at the skin.

Salt is one of the most important ingredients ever discovered. It’s uses are so wide and extremely significant that even historic wars and battles have been fought for it. Salt has a wide use when it comes to food preparation. Salt not only gives food flavoring, providing a much-needed flavor to what otherwise would be bland food, provides nutritional benefits, but it also is used for food preservation.

Salt is absolutely indispensable, but there’s something we should all know about salt. Most of the time, the salt that we are using is unhealthy and we don’t even know it. Another thing that we don’t know is that there is a pure salt that we can replace the not-so-healthy salt that we’re using everyday. Let’s weigh in on the three kinds:

1. Table Salt or Sodium Chloride – This is the most common type of salt that we see in the kitchen and it comes in coarse or very fine form. Some countries still use the coarser version of table salt, but in the US, coarse table salt has been done away, replacing it with the finest grains of salt. Most often this kind of salt is one that has to be bleached and stripped of minerals. We can see from here that the table salt has some very bad “cons” to it, as the salt undergoes too much processing for it to be called natural or organic, or at the very least ‘healthy’.

Sodium Chloride is harmful to the body as it introduces toxins that the body will have trouble expelling. It is a well known fact that pure Sodium Chloride causes dehydration. It occurs when the body tries to extract water from cells as a way to recuperate the damage the toxins from the salt have wrecked havoc on. Some have countered that table salt isn’t pure Sodium Chloride. To a length, it is right, but the fact remains that table salt is around 98% Sodium Chloride and just around 2% of good minerals like iodine.

2. Sea Salt – Commonly known as the healthier, organic alternative to processed table salt. But a closer look under a high-powered microscope would reveal that sea salt has irregular structures that separates the minerals. The body will have very little to gain as the minerals in the isolated structure is something that’s not easy to absorb.

When it comes to harvesting sea salt, there are additional issues. The seas have become more polluted; the oceans have been exposed to all kinds of things, such as human-produced garbage, and to even more deadly chemicals like factory wastes, oil sludge, mercury, dioxins and all other pollutants that harm us. A huge amount of the toxins are being absorbed in the salt, which makes the sea salts in the market today not a very good alternative to table salt.

3. Himalayan Salt – A relatively new discovery has led experts to believe that this might just be the only toxin-free salt in the world. Though it’s something new for most of us, it has been around for 250 million years. It is produced by the earth and it has been found to be one of the purely natural food item in the world and is entirely toxin-free and full of minerals that have been lost in other salt forms.

Compared to the Sea Salt, the crystalline structure in the Himalayan Salt has a more abundant mineral content – 84 mineral elements to be exact. Additionally is has a structure that is easily absorbed by the body unlike sea salt. Himalayan salt can come in a solid form or in granulated form. Gourmet chefs who use Himalayan salt use blocks of the salt formed into bowls and pots and cook directly from it. In everyday use, a finely grained Himalayan salt is more appropriate.

The only con of Himalayan Salt is its price. It’s not something you can easily find in the market as the salt source itself is very limited. This precious salt is mined from the government-controlled land of the Himalayan Mountains. However, there are many great websites on the internet where you can purchase Himalayan salt as a good price if you’re looking to live healthier.