Once again, it is “my face is on fire” season, and I have prepared by kitting myself out with a solar radiation suit designed by a team of uber-monkeys from General Kang’s Space division.
Actually, it’s a tube of sun-cream with an SPF of 55. Now, that’s supposed to mean that it will allow you to stay out in the sun 55 times longer than it would normally take you to burn.
So, if you normally burn in 12 minutes, theoretically, this would enable you to stay out in the sun for 11 hours. But what if you burn in several seconds? Let’s take the average vampire. Exposure to the sun’s life-giving rays usually turn you into a pile of dust in about thirty-forty seconds (unless you’re in one of those movies where you burst into flaming chunks of charcoal almost immediately). Let’s go with 10 seconds just to be on the safe side. (There is no room for error when you’re a 400-year-old metrosexual with a serious hemoglobin Jones.)
That means the average vampire can slap on some SPF 55, and survive 9.167 minutes! Minutes! Plenty of time to rip someone’s throat out, drink some of their blood, mince around in your velvet cape, and still get into your coffin before you have to reapply.
So far, I’ve found that I get about two hours before I get the telltale, “my face is on fire!” feeling. Working backwards, this means I would burn in 2.18 minutes.
Better than the average vampire, but damn, I’m one pale bastard.
Photo by Leadbetter74.