Sunburn is cell death due to DNA damage. It's a fail-safe that tries to limit the chance of things like melanoma by killing damaged cells off before they can re

Sunburn is cell death due to DNA damage. It's a fail-safe that tries to limit the chance of things like melanoma by killing damaged cells off before they can reproduce. The real culprit is the small chance some cells didn't die off and an even smaller subset manage to replicate with damaged DNA. The actual sunburn is just an indicator that you've exposed a number of skin cells to those odds.