13 Cooling Hacks to Stop You Frying Like A Damn Egg In The Heat This Summer

The team at Queensland Health want to make sure you’re sun safe by keeping a few basics tips in mind – seek shade, wear a hat, sunscreen, glasses and long sleeves – but we’ve pulled together a few extra tips to make the sticky season a little bit more bearable.

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Australian summer: it’s more than just an excuse to fall asleep on the couch watching the cricket. As memes the world over continue to remind us, it is basically a hell-furnace within which we roast for three (or more! Good thing climate change doesn’t exist, eh guys?) months, with the occasional respite provided by a terrifying thunderstorm. But it doesn’t have to be like this: as the days heat up and your brain starts to boil, remember these tips and minimise your chances of heat-related existential agony.

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Cold Sandwiches

Anyone with even the faintest memory of summer holidays – or, worse, early-February back-to-school lunches – will know the true horror of an overheated, steamed sanga. The solution is simple: keep a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer, and make a sandwich with frozen slices. By the time you whip it out (the sandwich, you degenerate) at the pool, it will have thawed, but the fillings will have been kept cool.

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Keep Your Phone Cool

An overheated smartphone is a one-way trip to sadness, so make sure to remember your electronic friend: take one of those small freezable “esky bricks” and insert it into a neoprene stubby holder (please admire my own classic of the genre in the photo above). Your phone can then rest against its cool new mattress in your bag without fear of a) heat or b) wetness. And as we all know thanks to the sage philosopher Derek Zoolander, wetness may be the essence of beauty, but it is also the essence of a busted phone. On that note…

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Poolside Phone Safety

 

Let’s be real: nobody expects you to forgo the possibility for humblebrag-related social media posts while you’re poolside and sipping tropical cocktails. However, dropping your smartphone in the swim-up bar will put paid to that very quickly. If you’re not fortunate enough to own one of those James Bond-esque waterproof cases, do not despair: a sandwich-sized Zip-Lock bag (or home-brand equivalent) is thin enough to maintain touch-screen functionality, but watertight enough to save you from splashes and sunscreen smears. We don’t recommend you experiment by submerging it, however.

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Cool Your Extremities

IMAGE CAPTION: Stay cool the Flashdance way

Here’s one from the “old wives’ tales” book that turns out to be true: run your wrists under cold water (or put a chilled, wet cloth over the back of your neck, or put your feet in a bucket of cold water) to cool down more efficiently. Bonus? It’ll rev you up, apparently: “When we exposed people to ice water, they performed better on a standard alertness test,” James Zacny, PhD, an anesthesiologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center, said in 2011.

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Make Your Own Fancy Fruit Water

Once the temperature soars and you lose the ability to eat anything that isn’t, basically, a sweet sac of water, you may find your kitchen overflowing with fruit. And as a kitchen full of fruit on a hot day is a recipe for the insect equivalent of the Zion rave in The Matrix, you don’t want that stuff sitting around. Solution: grab a few ice-cube trays (the old fashioned plastic ones are best), and stick a slice of fruit in each ‘hole’ before filling it with water. Result: fruit ice-cubes, which you then stick in your water bottle in order to get the same flavour as those fancy “a hint of fruit” waters that idiots who are not you pay over $4 to drink.

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Take A Leaf Out Of Marilyn’s Book

Chances are you’re not in the habit of scouring the back catalogue of Marilyn Monroe for summer tips, so allow her character from The Seven Year Itch to illuminate you as to the joys of putting your underwear in the freezer on a hot day:

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Cold (But Not Soggy) Pizza For Breakfast

Everybody knows that pizza is best the next day, and in summer, there are few delicacies finer than a slice or four of cold pizza – and yet, the eternal question remains: how do you prevent your refrigerated snack from turning into a handful of greasy slop? Simple: get some large-ish Zip-Lock bags, and then layer slices of pizza in between sheets of paper towel.

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Don’t Forget The Birds And The Bees

No, not ~the birds and the bees~ (though as anyone born in September will know, lots of wonderful miracles happen in summer when a man and a woman love each other very much), the actual birds and bees. Birds and insects, and certain reptiles and small mammals, get hot and thirsty in summer, too. (Bees carry water back to their hives to create evaporative cooling, since they don’t have tiny air-conditioners – yet.) Do your bit by laying some shallow dishes of water in the shade, and add lots of sticks and pebbles so that small creatures don’t drown while they’re taking a sip.

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Don’t Skimp On Sunscreen

Yeah, yeah: this sounds like something your nanna would say, and it’s not even really a “hack” (though “not getting skin cancer” is a pretty sick life hack). But every time we go outside, millions of people think that they can get away with smearing a blob of sunscreen the size of a grape (a dried one) all over their body. The truth, when it comes to how much sunscreen you should be using, is quite different. The rule of thumb tends to be about 2 milligrams of sunscreen per square centimeter of skin exposed. According to the Cancer Council Australia this is around 35 ml per full body application. In practice, this means applying one teaspoon per limb, back, trunk, face and neck areas. the equivalent of a shot glass of sunscreen to the exposed areas of the face and body,” according to clinical associate professor of dermatology Dr Elizabeth K. Hale. Or, in Sun Smart’s words, around 35ml per “full body” application.

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Shampoo Bottle Wallet

This one comes straight to you from the finest (or most deranged, you decide) minds of the internet. Worrying about your purse or wallet at the beach or pool is one of summer’s most enduring activities; cut down on concern time by making a “wallet” out of an old shampoo bottle. Clean the bottle out, and cut off enough of the top so that the cap still fits (this works best with larger lids like the photo above), and unless your beach or pool is overrun by thieves desperate to lather up, you can store your cash and phone without a care in the world.

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DIY Air-Conditioner

It’s a universal truth known to all renters: most landlords are too stingy to install an air-conditioner. With that in mind, circumvent their cruelty by making your own ersatz air-con, the way your nanna probably did it: take a big dish, fill it full of ice-cubes, and place it directly in front of your fan. The melting ice will create an evaporative cooling effect. Also, turn everything (except the fan) off: appliances that generate heat, like dryers, computers, big televisions, etc, will up the temperature inside. Read a book or something.

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Embrace Dadcore

 

Remember back when you were little and your father would embarrass everyone with his arsenal of summer gadgets? Doesn’t look so mental now you’re older and more likely to find summer unbearable, does it? Take a leaf out of the books of dads and great uncles’ everywhere, and find yourself one of those peaked caps with a solar-powered fan in the brim: you’ll take normcore to the next level and avoid a sweaty brow to boot.

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BYO Ice Blocks

Grab all your empty water bottles (plastic ones, please, it’s awfully hard to tell the difference between an icicle and a throat-mangling shard of broken glass), and fill them with just enough water so that the neck of the bottle is still ‘clear’ if you lay the bottle on its side in the freezer. Once the water is frozen, you’ll have an XXL ice cube and plenty of bottle space to fill with your chosen drink.

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Clem Bastow is an award-winning writer and critic with a focus on popular culture, gender politics, mental health, and weird internet humour. She has sat in each of the Back To The Future trilogy Deloreans, but can’t drive. She’s on Twitter at@clembastow