CLEAN Fun in the Sun
You can probably relate with that summer ritual – the slathering sunscreen on ourselves, our spouses, our children, and the backs of our friends. After all, isn’t it a right thing to do given the alarming rate of skin cancer? What exactly we are coating ourselves with? Have you ever stopped to read the label of your favorite sun protection? Have we been doing the right thing?
As a teenager, I would fry myself as I sat on the beach or beside the pool. My favorite oil was cocoa butter I had put in an old margarine tub to melt in the sun, which I would then apply liberally to my skin. (That’s probably why smelling chocolate reminds me of those hot summer days.) My sister’s oil of choice was baby oil. We would then bake away all summer long like a couple of lamb chops. My skin browns quite nicely but hers would be lobster red and gathering more freckles with every outing. In the 1980s, the goal was a bronze tan and not protection from an unconsidered danger.
It is now known that the sun’s rays, UVA, UVB, and HEV, can cause damage. They affect skin differently. An easy way to remember them is UVA are aging rays and UVB are burning ones. HEV are blue light rays that not only come from the sun but our computer and phone screens, as well as sunlight reflected from snow, water, sand, and glass. Although a variety of skin damage can occur, skin cancer is the scariest.
So, when the sun is out, especially between 10 AM and 3 PM, it is necessary to protect exposed skin. In my younger days, lifeguards at the beach or pool would have white noses – they were putting on zinc oxide, which is called a “physical” sunscreen. It is a barrier that sits on top of your skin and protects it from the sun’s harmful rays by blocking, reflecting, or scattering the rays. Clothing would also be a “physical” sunscreen. The other type of sunscreen is considered a “chemical” sunscreen because it chemically absorbs UVA and UVB rays. The chemicals deflect light to prevent sunburn and have a slight exothermic reaction creating heat.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers sunscreen to be a drug. Because of that, it is more tightly monitored with regulations – so it does not fall under the less regulated cosmetic/beauty care umbrella. The next time you purchase sunscreen, look at the ingredients label and it should say, “DRUG FACTS,” instead of just giving a list of ingredients. If the sunscreen in your cart does not have this information, find another.
According to an article published by the Washington Post on June 5, 2021, Valisure, a pharmaceutical watchdog group, petitioned the FDA this year to recall 40 different lots of sunscreen and sun care products because of a detection of benzene in the products. Benzene, a volatile petroleum by-product, at even low levels of contamination, is considered a carcinogen. According to the centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leukemia (cancer of blood-forming organs), anemia (a decrease in red blood cells), excessive bleeding, and decreased ovary size have all been linked to long-term benzene exposure. Valisure revealed that 27% of samples from different brands of sunscreen and after-sun care products they tested contained detectable benzene. Some tested batches contained up to 3 times the conditionally-restricted FDA concentration limit of 2 parts per million (ppm).
It is important to note benzene will most likely not appear on the ingredients list of your favorite sunscreen. It is not a necessary component for sunscreen protection even though it can be found in both chemical and physical sunscreens. Rather it is a result of a manufacturing contaminant problem, an unintentional “hitchhiker” with one of the product’s ingredients. The safe personal care movement is not just about controlling ingredients but also performing adequate product quality assurance and control to prevent the presence of these unwanted constituents.
In other recent news about sunscreen, Hawaii banned the sale of sunscreen and sun care products that contain oxybenzone and octinoxate. This bill (Gabbard SB2571) went into effect January 2021. “Oxybenzone is really toxic to the juvenile form of corals,” Craig Downs, a forensic ecotoxicologist, told CNN in a July 2018 interview. “When it washes off your body and into the ocean, the chemicals can cause ‘bleaching, deformities, DNA damage, and death in coral.’” Damage to coral reefs has a cascading effect through the marine ecosystem. Twenty five percent of marine organisms relies on coral reefs at some point during its life cycle. Hawaii is looking to ban two other petrochemicals found in sunscreen, avobenzone and octocrylene, starting January 2023 (Kanuha SB132).
But, these active ingredients in chemical sunscreens are not only harmful to corals and their ecosystems; they have been found to be harmful to us as well. A few of these chemicals are responsible for enhancing penetration of the ingredients into the skin thereby allowing the chemicals and the harmful sun’s rays to absorb as well. They have also been identified as the source of skin allergies and found to be hormone disrupters.
According to the Journal of Human Reproduction, between 1973-2011, men’s sperm count in North America, Europe and Australia has dropped by 52%. According to US National Library of Medicine, women have also seen an increase in disruptions to their own reproductive functions including infertility, improper hormone production, menstrual cycle abnormalities and more. With chemicals being used in our products that are known hormone disrupters, it is certainly becoming evident that part of the reason for the rise in infertility could be associated with frequent exposure to unsafe ingredients in the products we use on a daily basis. Having had my own fertility struggles, this information is alarming. So, what can we do to protect ourselves while protecting our skin?
God did not give us a spirit of fear but of power, love, and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7). We can take information like this and become wiser consumers of products. Whether it is skincare, household, food, or products we use every day, we can be prudent and skeptical shoppers. Most of us already buy organic food, now with this recall on sunscreen we can begin to choose sunscreen and sun care products with care.
With summer in full swing, we can swap out our sunscreens for safer ones. We can stock our supply to slather on physical sunscreens with well-known effective safe ingredients (zinc oxide and titanium dioxide) that block the sun’s harmful rays. We can have clean fun in the sun.
