Rash Guard
Your Skin's Best Friend

by Ethan
(Santa Barbara, Ca , USA)

I was born on the waves. I mean this both figuratively and literally.

My mother’s hospital room in the maternity ward where I was born had a window looking out onto the beach of Santa Barbara, and my mother says that looking out at the waves was the only source of calm she felt during my calamitous seven hour labor process.

Shortly after bringing me home from the hospital, my parents decided that rather than walking, swimming would be the most useful manner of transportation for me to learn first in life.

From swimming on the waves I soon learned to surf on them. I remember coming home from the beach every Sunday afternoon, and the look of horror on my mother’s face when she saw the scratches covering my body from where my bare skin had been rubbed raw by the surf board.

The beach’s tiny grains of sand, so soft and silky underfoot, stuck to the wax on my surf board and transformed into tiny barbs, cutting into my skin as I would slide on and off.

And so, for my twelfth birthday, my mother gave me a set of six Rash Guard shirts, all in assorted colors, with the instructions that I was never to set foot on a surf board without them again.

After trying them for the first time, I certainly had no will to argue. The rash guard shirts made the hours in the sun less of a hardship on my fair skin due to their high UPF ratin.

They provided an excellent barrier between my skin and the rough surface of the board. From then on, I never surfed without the protection of my Rash Guard tees.