If they do, except under extreme exposure, it is a sign that you have not been living out of doors enough.
The various face-washes and creams and dusting powders which are used for the relief of sunburn, while they may, if mild enough, make the face feel somewhat more comfortable for a little time, owe most of their virtues to the fact that they are generally used at bedtime and then get the credit for the cure which nature works while you are asleep.

If you should buy them, and keep them on your dressing-table unopened, where you could see them before you went to bed, you would in nine cases out of ten be just as much better in the morning as if you had used them.
The only harm done by freckles is to your vanity.

They and sunburn both, in fact, are protective actions on nature's part, filling the skin with coloring matter, or _pigment_, so as to protect it, and the tissues below, from the irritating effects of the strong rays of light.
A like deposit of pigment, in greater amounts, in the skins of races who live in or near the tropics, gives rise to the characteristic coloring of the black, brown, and yellow races.

The pigment, or coloring matter, is of exactly the same kind in all, from the negro to the white.

The brown race having a little less of it than the negro, the yellow race a little less yet, and the white least of all, though there is some of it in even the whitest of skins.
Real Skin Diseases.