[RealityVoid]

I am unconvinced by this argument. After all, the same light flux is hitting your body. Only thing a lens would do is make it focus in different spots than it otherwise would, but then you'd get spots with burns and spots without burns. This is not what I see happening at all.

[true_religion]

It does happen, but due to inflammation and the fact that the “lens” wobbles since it is made out of water, you get enough consistency that it’s not noticeable without a detailed inspection.

It’s possibly still noticeable via the naked eye, but you’d have to compare and contrast to notice the slight mottling.

[tartoran]

If the drops or any layer of water were staying still you'd probably get some patters, but they don't.

[tartoran]

I don't know why I am being downvoted here. Here's a link to a Scientific American article [0]

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-magnifying-ef...

[morsch]

Nobody doubts that a drop of water can act as a kind of lens. The question is then if a large number of very small water-drop-lenses contribute to sunburn.

The argument is that the light flux (the total amount of energy) hitting your body is the same. A lens just focuses the energy of a wide area (the size of the lens) onto a smaller spot, it doesn't add any energy to the equation. If the lenses are kept totally still, you would get a higher flux (more of a sunburn) in the focal point, and less energy (less of a sunburn) around the focal point. If the lenses move around a lot, it all averages out into not having any effect at all.

Here's some discussion on the topic: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71263/why-does-w...

There's a counterargument to the above in that thread: the droplet-lenses have a larger surface area than the area they're covering, which lends them the ability to gather more light flux than the area they're covering. This seems rather theoretical, though.