![]() Physical sunscreens, sometimes called “mineral” sunscreens, bounce the sun’s rays away so that they don’t hit your skin, and break down over time after being bombarded with particles of light, aka photons. You can find two types of sunscreens: physical and chemical. To keep things short if you don’t want to read this whole thing: Both oxybenzone and retinyl palmitate are perfectly safe in sunscreens when you use them as the bottle’s label indicates.īefore we get into the nitty-gritty details on what these compounds are, here’s a quick primer on how sunscreens work. Two chemicals that the EWG vilifies in this report are oxybenzone and retinyl palmitate. But on others, the organization’s advice starts to go off the rails. ![]() So the EWG’s guide is accurate and reasonable on the above points. And while that can be a perfectly legitimate lifestyle choice, everybody else might want to just use sunscreen with an SPF of 30 to 50. Nothing will protect you 100 percent from UVB rays, except maybe being in a basement with no windows. The relationship between SPF and protection is not linear-SPF 15, for example, filters 93 percent of UVB rays SPF 30, 97 percent SPF 50, 98 percent. The EWG also advises people to avoid sunscreen with a really high SPF number, or sun protection factor, as such products could make it seem like you’re more protected than you are. From our guide to sunscreen: “According to all seven dermatologists we interviewed, as well as the many scientific papers and lit reviews we read, if you’re outside, you should be applying a full shot glass’s worth of sunscreen to your near-naked body about once an hour in order to get adequate protection with your sunscreen.” That last bit is critical, because probably the most important thing about sunscreen is that you wear a lot of it and that you’re able to see how much you’re putting on. Specifically, you can inhale it (bad), you still need to rub the substance into your skin, you can have difficulty getting it on evenly, and you can’t really tell how much you’ve put on. The EWG advises people to stay away from spray sunscreen, as do we in our sunscreen guide. ![]() Here we’ve identified where the group’s advice is right on, where its suggestions are a little questionable, and what gets lost in translation between scientific information and the EWG’s interpretation. (If I could find Tigger sunscreen, my son would never want to take it off.)Īlthough the posts in your Facebook feed may be extreme in proclaiming that we’re dooming our children to the cancer ward, the EWG’s guide and accompanying blog post actually have some good information. Judging from my own kids’ behavior, I would say that labels with cartoon characters on them would go over very well. ![]() Sunscreens marketed for kids have the exact same ingredients that adult sunscreens have. Please, put sunscreen on your children-they do not need their own special stuff. I’ll get into why some of what the EWG says is misleading, but we’ve done our own investigation into sunscreen, and here is the most important conclusion from our guide: “Everything I read and everyone I talked to said that UV radiation-a known carcinogen-is a far more established threat than anything we are currently putting in sunscreen.” To get to the bottom of this, I talked to Sonya Lunder, senior analyst for the EWG and author of the 2016 sunscreen guide, and I looked at the papers the organization cites for the guide. For this year’s scare, the EWG has named the 13 “worst” sunscreens for kids, declaring that they contain harmful chemicals and superhigh SPF values. This time the EWG is hitting us in our soft spot by targeting kids’ sunscreens in particular. ![]() Oh! Thanks, Environmental Working Group! Right on schedule. Right now we’re in the early summer, so cue the reports on how our sunscreen is slowly poisoning us. One day we hear that cell phones will give us cancer (they won’t), the next it’s how eating microwave popcorn might kill us. Oh, Internet-how you love to scare us so. ![]()
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