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.