reply to post by Greenize
Hmmm...so the body product angle appears to be out. The stomach and legs are more sensitive to sunlight than elsewhere on the body and are also slower
to heal from a burn. That can account for a reasonable variation in sunburn colour across the body, but it cannot account for the drastic variation
you present: severe, purple burn adjacent to normal skin.
To account for this variation, there must be some external cause (shadow or chemical application to the affected skin) or internal cause (an anomaly
within the affected skin, perhaps). Considering your details, shade is really the only reasonable cause I can imagine, but even it is unlikely. If you
were drifting in the pool, the shade would need to drift perfectly in line with your upper body, leaving your lower body exposed to more
sunlight--clearly a very unlikely scenario. If you were not drifting and instead remained in one precise spot, the shade would likewise need to be
from a stationary object (also, the sun presumably remained in more or less the same spot during the hour and half of exposure). Clouds would be an
unlikely fit for either case. With that said, if the sun's rays were evenly distributed across your body, more powerful sunlight cannot be an
explanation for your partial burn.
I assume there is nothing in your raft that would have obscured your upper body. This is a mystery. If your entire body received the same amount of
sun exposure, but only the lower half burned, I can only imagine there must be something very odd going on within that region of your skin. That would
be a case for Dr. House, not paperplanes

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[edit on 4/7/09 by paperplanes]