hi it's Michelle of Lab Muffin
Beauty Science chemistry PhD cosmetic chemist big fan of sunscreen
not such a fan of sunscreen myths it's summer for almost everyone but Australians
so everyone is talking about sunscreens I've debunked a lot of myths about sunscreen
before things like sunscreens are toxic you can make your own sunscreen safely but today I'm going
to be focusing on incorrect advice from trusted media sources because you would expect them to
be correct and these myths are a bit harder to spot and they have less obvious but still bad
consequences I'm going to go through a bunch of sunscreen news articles explain what they
got wrong and what you should be doing instead I don't entirely blame the people
writing these articles because this is part of a larger problem with
sunscreen misinformation from trusted sources which we will see hopefully
this will be an interesting excursion like and subscribe for more nerdy beauty content we're going to start with this article
from USA Today called what is mineral sunscreen and why you may want to
use it instead of chemical sunscreen I'm trying not to have a reaction just to
this headline because a lot of sunscreen myths end up supporting this idea that mineral
sunscreens are better and safer which is mostly just confirmation bias for people's gut feelings
that natural things should be safer and better this isn't true this is just a gut feeling that
we've evolved because back in the day we would go into the wild and if we saw something
weird it was probably going to be dangerous but these days we have much better ways of working
out which things are dangerous versus safe we don't have to rely on this gut feeling which
just doesn't really work in our modern world but I guess technically this headline is fair
because mineral sunscreen is a better option for some people just not as many as the media
and social media tends to make it out to be for most people chemical sunscreens are going
to be a better option and they actually do say the reasons why so they say there is ease
of application and aesthetic appeal and these two things are really underrated
mineral sunscreen gives a white cast on lots of people's skin especially if you are
darker skinned it also tends to feel thicker and less comfortable so that means a lot
of people don't apply enough or they just skip applying it all together which is a much
worse situation than using a chemical sunscreen there are currently 14 FDA approved
chemical filters in the US but many more overseas chemical sunscreens
have very small amounts of systemic absorption into one's bloodstream so
systemic means it goes into your body and goes everywhere so it could potentially
affect parts of your body not just your skin this finding has drawn lots of attention however at this time it is not known that
this trace amount is problematic this is a pretty good summary of those FDA
studies that came out in 2019 and 2020 I would have preferred if she also mentioned
where the current evidence is pointing so for example in the EU this absorption
has been known for quite a long time and so they've always assessed the safety of
sunscreens based on that for like almost 20 years I go into a lot more detail about the
evidence in my US versus EU sunscreens video basically the EU has been re-evaluating
a lot of these older more controversial chemical sunscreens and there is
still a really large margin of safety she says additionally if one has
really sensitive skin chemical sunscreens are more likely to cause a
reaction this is true on average for US sunscreens but on an individual
level this is not necessarily true in Europe for example mineral-only sunscreens
aren't really a thing all their sensitive skin sunscreens have lots of chemical filters because
they tend to be better at blocking UV they tend to use the newer chemical filters that don't get
into the skin as easily to cause irritation and so overall you end up with more protection
against both irritants as well as the sun there's also this issue with SPF boosters which
are these chemical sunscreen like ingredients that are not strictly regulated as chemical sunscreens
but they have very similar structures and very similar properties these are listed as inactive
ingredients rather than active ingredients and so people aren't looking out for them and they
end up reacting and they just don't know why Newsome says mineral sunscreen could
be referred to as physical sunscreen because it's a physical blocker they're
really really good because they reflect the UV rather than the chemical
sunscreen that absorbs the UV this is the most common myth in all the
sunscreen articles I've read it is like the origin of a whole bunch of myths
for why mineral sunscreens are better I made this family tree a while ago
showing how this has birthed so many myths so it's been known for a really long time more
than 50 years that mineral sunscreens also mostly absorb UV only about five to ten percent is
reflected this is because these mineral sunscreens have a semiconductor structure I've talked about
it before in my video on how sunscreens work one of the big reasons this myth is still around is because the American Academy of
Dermatology website still has this there's an article in 2016 that
re-demonstrated that this is true for sunscreen specifically
but yeah it's just still around this is one of those issues where you
would think you would be able to trust a source but this is not their specialty
my best advice for working out what is and isn't true is to look for the consensus of
relevant experts for how sunscreens interact with UV this is chemistry or physics it
isn't dermatology and so those are the more relevant experts and the consensus is
overwhelmingly that they work by absorption so there isn't much of a difference they're
not going to be really really good because they reflect this extra five percent it isn't really
reflected this five to ten percent is actually scattered and most of that UV gets scattered
towards the skin deeper in to that sunscreen layer most of the time it'll hit another molecule
and get absorbed which is what we want absorption is better because it actually takes the UV and
turns it into something else usually mostly heat the scattering just kind of bounces the UV
somewhere else and lets someone else deal with it Newsom says mineral sunscreen is
a little bit more effective than chemical sunscreen they have a little
bit broader spectrum of coverage if you look at zinc oxide it does look like
it has a pretty flat spectrum it covers a lot of wavelengths on its own but if you take
chemical sunscreens and put them together they cover the same wavelengths and usually they can
get much higher protection so it doesn't really matter that zinc oxide on its own can cover
everything because when you buy a sunscreen you're not buying individual chemical filters
this is a problem that is solved by the people formulating the sunscreen we don't have to
worry about this we just buy the one sunscreen so we're looking for a high SPF rating
and the words broad spectrum or a high PPD or PA rating that's what these are
there for these directly measure what sort of protection you're getting from the product the article mentions the issues with
the application and aesthetics people are less likely to apply the appropriate
amount due to the thicker opaque nature of these formulations completely
true this is a huge problem however in recent years mineral
sunscreens have come a long way and there are now numerous products with
a lightweight feel that apply with ease this is true but a lot of the time they are
still relying on those SPF boosters which are really just chemical sunscreen so really
they are hybrid sunscreens pretending to be mineral sunscreens which is kind of just false
advertising that I'm not really comfortable with next she mentions that there are tinted mineral
sunscreens which just basically takes the white cast out of it which isn't entirely true that
white cast is still often there and sometimes the tint is also not quite the right color
for your face so it's kind of like I guess two bad things that still
end up making one bad thing but I think looking for a tinted mineral
sunscreen is still pretty good advice this next bit though chemical sunscreens have also been
implicated in harming marine life in the ocean Newsom says you can avoid this by using mineral
sunscreens as they are very safe there is this really common myth that chemical sunscreens and
nano mineral sunscreens are bad for marine life but non-nano mineral sunscreen is completely
safe this is based on this 2016 study by Craig Downs and co-workers the scientists who did
this study promoted really aggressively in the media on the day of release which is
pretty unusual I've explained this a bit more in my video on reef safe sunscreens
as well as in my environmental myths video last year the national academies did a review
of all of the evidence and their conclusion is mineral and chemical sunscreens overlap in
regard to environmental impact but overall it doesn't seem like sunscreen has much of
an impact at all because they are massively diluted the amounts in the ocean are so tiny
and the effect they can have is really really small compared to things like global warming and
agricultural runoff and land use and overfishing that downs study was a massive outlier there
were lots of issues with how they conducted their experiments this article links to
an NOAA page called Skin Care chemicals and coral reefs which is another example
of a source you thought you could trust this page has kind of been haunting me
for a few years because people would always bring it up in arguments to say the
NOAA obviously knows more about coral than you do so it's worth mentioning that in the
National academies report which was written by a lot of coral experts who actually did
the original studies specifically references this page alongside the ewg and a bunch of other
questionable pages as examples of misinformation the page says NOAA is reviewing the National
Academies study and upon completion of this review they will update the information presented in this
article as warranted that was done in August 2022 clearly there are still media articles relying
on it so it would be nice if they updated it onto our next article this is from NPR and
it's called picking the right sunscreen isn't as important as avoiding these six mistakes so I
quite like the overall message of this headline because there aren't that many differences
between sunscreens I do think people tend to over focus on things like mineral versus
chemical really over analyzing their sunscreens really the best thing to do is to pick a
sunscreen that you like and apply a lot of it so they start by telling you to chuck
out last year's sunscreen which I think is pretty good advice if your sunscreen
has been in last year's pool bag it's probably been sitting around in the
heat and heat is bad for sunscreens sunscreens are emulsions that means they are
blends of water and oil-based ingredients which are not happy together they're held in place
temporarily by emulsifiers but eventually they want to separate if you have heat that gives them
enough energy to start separating faster sometimes when you squirt out an old sunscreen you'll see
that it has separated and that means it's not going to apply on on your skin the same way so
the advice is good but the reason is not as good they say the active compounds can
degrade and lose their effectiveness this is true but most of the time it is
the separation and this does contribute to the idea that mineral sunscreens
are more stable which is not really true because those minerals are quite
dense they want to settle to the bottom but they don't quite say that
so I'm going to leave that as half a myth in my rather subjective scoring system so the first mistake they list is concerned
about chemicals try a mineral alternative I don't like the way they've worded
this because they are just kind of accepting the premise that chemicals
are something to be concerned about even though of course mineral sunscreens
contain chemicals everything is chemicals but also chemical sunscreen specifically are
meant to be something to be concerned about so they sum up the situation with the FDA
and they say there's no evidence of harm but then they end with still if you're
concerned there are options to avoid these compounds I do like that they're
highlighting there are options if you are concerned but they're kind of both
sides-ing this as a media outlet I think their role is to get to the truth show the
scientific consensus which is they are safe and the FDA actually has a quiz on their
site one of the questions is actually a recent FDA study showed that some sunscreen
ingredients are absorbed into the body and they give you four options for what
you should do the correct option is I should continue to use sunscreen
as directed evidence of absorption doesn't mean these ingredients aren't
safe it just means more data is needed at the time those studies were published the FDA also said you didn't have to
avoid particular ingredients so as expected they have the whole thing
about physical sunscreens physically blocking UV light which is not true but
then they add that zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are much safer than chemical
sunscreens because they're so inert inert means that they don't react but that's
not why they're safer they're safer because their particles are huge and can't get through
the skin very far this is actually how the newer chemical sunscreens are designed zinc oxide and
titanium dioxide are not inert a lot of the time they get coated before they get put into a
sunscreen to make like a physical barrier between those particles and the rest of the
sunscreen because they mess up the formulation and this inert concept is linked to the idea
that chemical sunscreens have to react with skin to work NPR has that in another sunscreen
article that's linked from this article this leads to other myths like chemical sunscreens
take 20 minutes to work or they have to be applied to bare skin both of which are not true
they work immediately you can put some chemical sunscreen on a piece of paper shine a UV light
on it and you can see that it is blocking the UV they make some points about why mineral
sunscreens are better they're less likely to irritate which I guess is fair
and there are newer ones which are more cosmetically elegant again
I think that's fair but this one unlike chemical sunscreens these mineral based
sun blocks can stay on the surface of skin and act as a shield or barrier to deflect sunlight
chemical sunscreens also almost completely stay on the surface they don't go past the top few layers
of skin which are dead except in tiny quantities again I think this comes from that
word absorb as well as absorbing UV people have confused that with
absorbing into skin and again we have a link to that NOAA page on
sunscreens destroying coral reefs now here is another myth that I see a lot a sunscreen with an SPF sun protection
factor of 15 blocks about 93% of UV rays when you bump that off to SPF 30
you're blocking about 97% higher than that you're not getting a lot more sun protection this is not a good way of looking
at it for a few different reasons you can look at what gets blocked versus
what gets in so you can say 93% versus 97% or you can say seven percent gets
in versus three percent gets in what gets in makes more sense because that
is what impacts you it only matters if it does and starts interacting with stuff inside
your body that means that SPF 15 is letting in about twice as many UV photons which
means you have double the chance of damage the second part of this is that 97% only
happens if you apply it perfectly exactly two milligrams per square centimeter
and you apply it perfectly evenly over your entire skin which is not going to
happen most people don't apply enough they apply less than half that amount which
means you get half of the protection plus even us sunscreen nerds are not going to
apply perfectly evenly to all of our skin but when you're looking at what gets in that still
scales with protection so SPF 30 will always let in half as much UV as SPF 15 if you apply the same
amount you will always get double the protection so this leads into this other aspect which
is there's no point going above SPF 30 but this isn't true in practice because
of all this stuff we've just talked about there are studies where people
applied SPF 100 or SPF 50 sunscreen there were about half as many sunburns
with SPF 100 not just one percent less this is actually why SPF ratings are
designed the way they are you are not meant to overthink that number there's
a paper from some sunscreen scientists trying to get people to stop saying this 97%
thing but the AAD still has it on their website I do agree with this bit of skimping on
sunscreen is probably a bigger mistake than not going above SPF 30 but the
amounts they recommend are not correct the recommendations for sunscreen
amounts are based on two milligrams per square centimeter which is what you
need to get that SPF on the label for the average adult it's pretty much agreed
that it will be 35 mL for your entire body there are a bunch of papers calculating
how much you should be applying and then translating it to rough amounts that are easy
to remember that's where all this shotglass and teaspoon stuff comes from there's even
a paper where they suggest a beer cap now the problem with all of these guidelines
is that they are rough and the more people talk about them on the Internet the more
it spreads it gets rougher and rougher on top of that there is this sort of like
imperial versus metric issue the size of a shot glass is not standard around the world
in Australia it is 30 mL in the US it is 30 to 44 mLs in Romania it is 100 mLs so one ounce
is closer to the right amount than 1.5 ounces now for the face one of the original
papers where they suggest this teaspoon thing they actually calculated three mL
which is a bit over half a teaspoon for the face and neck this has been further
approximated by different places like the Australian Cancer Council they recommend
one teaspoon for face and neck and ears a lot of people have also measured how big
their face is a quarter teaspoon for just your face is actually a pretty generous
estimate already so one teaspoon is just too much that is four times as much and
most people's faces don't even need that full quarter teaspoon for my face this teaspoon
would be six and a half times too much it just isn't really achievable and I think when
you give people such an unachievable goal it's just really discouraging you just end up
thinking sunscreen isn't going to work unless it's dripping off your face and that's not
worth it so you may as well just not bother they have some good advice here they say
spray sunscreens are risky which is true they say SPF doesn't tell you about time and
you still need to reapply sunscreen they have the correct explanation for why you need to
reapply because they wear off especially if you're swimming or sweating they mention that
you still can get sunburned on a cloudy day which is true and they say don't keep your
sunscreen in a hot place very good advice layering sunscreen with hats clothing
and sunglasses this is great advice I have some videos on how to choose sun protective
clothing and how much protection you get with hats they also mentioned these UV stickers which tell
you when it's time to reapply sunscreen which is the correct use of them I've seen a lot of
people on social media using them to test sunscreens which doesn't actually work it's just
meant to be a cute way of reminding you to reapply now this next part is a bit of an issue I've
seen this in a bunch of articles lately it's this idea that people with black skin still need
to use sunscreen to prevent skin cancer there's a research dermatologist who's done a lot of
work on this topic his name is Ade Adamson he gave a talk at the sunscreen e-summit I
hosted with Jen of the Eco well last year he has analyzed lots of different types
of data and they all show that there is no correlation between sun exposure and
skin cancer in black skin for example there is no increase in skin cancer in black
skin when you go to towards the equator now it is true that black people
do still get melanoma and not in sun exposed areas but it isn't
because there's less melanin there a lot of people mention Bob Marley and how he died
of a melanoma under his toenail but that was an acral melanoma which is not associated with sun
exposure even in white skin toenails are actually excellent sunscreen they block all of UV and
they only let in about 0.5 to 2.5 percent of UVA there is a concern with people with black skin
they tend to have lower skin cancer survival rates because they tend to be detected
later and this is because of systemic issues black people are less likely to go to
the dermatologist and melanomas don't look the same on dark skin so a lot of doctors
can't spot them because of lack of training so the message that black people can
still get skin cancer is helpful but then linking it to sun exposure linking it
to not wearing enough sunscreen is just not right this is the wrong solution it
doesn't really help and it sort of misallocates your resources whether that's
attention or investment in public health there are other reasons for black people
to wear sunscreen it prevents wrinkles it prevents hyperpigmentation which
is how dark skin tends to age and it prevents sunburn but skin cancer
is not a good reason to wear it there's this Washington Post article recently
where they had Dr Adamson talking about his research and then a bunch of other dermatologists
saying people with black skin still need to wear sunscreen and they presented both sides
as equal but this is just not how science works it's not a popular vote again it's
about the consensus of relevant experts and Dr Adamson is much more relevant than other
dermatologists here he's done that research and scientific consensus isn't just like an
opinion you need the scientists to look at and understand the same data and come to
a conclusion that makes scientific sense the next article is from the mirror doctor
explains what SPF number on sunscreen really means and how often to reapply so the
first thing they talk about after all the fluff is what does SPF mean and they
say SPF refers to the amount of time you can stay day out in the sun without burning
so with SPF 50 you can stay out in the sun 50 times longer without burning than you
could have if you didn't have sunscreen on this myth is really common
and the reason it doesn't work is because the sun's intensity changes a lot in SPF testing time works because the lamp gives
out a constant amount of UV so the UV dose that you're getting how much is getting into your
skin is directly proportional to how long that lamp has been on but this doesn't work in the sun
and it definitely doesn't work with higher SPF in the middle of the day in summer fair
skin burns in about 10 minutes and so SPF 50 50 times longer that's 500 minutes which
is more than eight hours your sunscreen is not going to stay on your skin in an even film
for eight hours you're going to have to reapply it because it will start clumping up it will
start sweating off so a better definition is really just this it's a measure of how well
the sunscreen protects you from getting burnt there is another myth here which is that
SPF is just to do with the effect of UVB it isn't there's also some contribution
to burning from UVA if you blocked out all the UVB and led in all the UVA
you would only get SPF of around 11 on its own it's not the worst myth but it is
linked to another myth which is mentioned here UVA rays from the sun are the
ones that cause the DNA damage it's actually almost completely the other
way around UVB damages DNA directly DNA will actually absorb UVB and kind of explode
DNA is actually transparent to UVA UVA will interact with other things and form free
radicals which then indirectly damage DNA the reason I think this myth exists is
because we knew about UVB being bad for ages but we didn't discover uva's damage
for quite a long time so there's this misconception that UVA is more dangerous when
in reality it's just been previously underrated now there is one good thing about UVB and that is
it helps with vitamin D production so this myth has led to a lot of people asking why don't we
just have UVA sunscreens that let in all the UVB why don't we just look for the highest
UVA protection I don't care about SPF but you should care about SPF because DNA damage again there's this idea that how much
sunscreen you apply is more important than SPF I don't really agree I think they
are both important if you have lower SPF you'll need to apply more and vice versa but
that is really just a difference of opinion this one is a common myth I've been seeing
in the news for chemical sunscreens you need to reapply every two to three
hours as it degrades in sunshine and becomes less effective mineral sunscreens
only need to be reapplied after swimming towelling off or rubbing it off this is
incorrect and actually quite dangerous the reason you need to reapply sunscreen is
not because the chemicals are decomposing it's because the sunscreen film clumps up on
your skin because you have this film sitting on your skin you have sweat you have trans
epidermal water loss water is just evaporating out of your skin you have oil coming out
from below your skin is moving around that does not want to stay as a nice even complete
film once you have water and oil punching holes in the film from below you're not
going to have protection in that gap if you look on the back of a mineral
sunscreen it will tell you to reapply every two hours as well as during
these times after swimming toweling etc mineral sunscreens can in fact last less
long on the skin because they are chunky chemical sunscreens can absorb into those
top layers and that kind of keeps it in place but mineral sunscreens just sit
on top of your skin in those particles and they tend to move around and go
into furrows so definitely reapply your mineral sunscreen just like you
would reapply a chemical sunscreen this bit is correct even if it says
the sunscreen is water resistant you still need to reapply after swimming
that water resistant rating is based on people sitting still in a tub of water
you're probably going to be moving around a lot more in the water which will
make that sunscreen wear off faster this next bit moisturizer foundation
with SPF isn't sufficient I agree with the foundation but not with the
moisturizer the way a moisturizer with SPF and a sunscreen are formulated
are the same whether the product gets sold as sunscreen or a moisturizer is just
based on marketing not based on what it does so as long as you apply the same amount
like quarter teaspoon to just your face you will get the same protection there
are studies that compared how much of a sunscreen people applied and how much of an
SPF moisturizer and they found that the SPF moisturizer wasn't applied as much but these
are generally the SPF moisturizers that come in jars they're really not representative
of what's on the market there are a lot of SPF rated moisturizers which could have very
well just had the word sunscreen on them in Australia there's a bunch of formulas that are
really similar they have the same percentages of the active ingredients and sometimes they're
called SPF moisturizers sometimes they're called sunscreens so I would judge just based on texture
and not on what word they used on the packaging this is also probably not the best order putting
sunscreen and then moisturizer there are a couple of studies that found that if you put the
moisturizer on after sunscreen then it kind of works like a cleansing oil the film just gets
messed up because when you apply a moisturizer you rub it in general if you've put on the sunscreen
layer you just want to disturb it as little as possible so putting the moisturizer on underneath
is a better idea even better would be if you just use a moisturizing sunscreen or an SPF moisturizer
just have both of them in the one product our next article is from Vox it's called
seven burning questions about sunscreens answered the subtitle is yes you
need to wear it and the start of the article talks about things like how
sunscreen is non-negotiable regardless of the weather or your skin type
any dermatologist will say so one thing that's interesting is that
this seems to be only the consensus for US dermatologists even in Australia with
our level of sun our official guidelines say you only need to wear sunscreen
if the UV index is three or above now if you're into skincare I
think you should wear it every day because so many skin concerns
are made worse by UV but from a skin cancer perspective I really don't
think this is supported by the evidence and again we have this myth regular sunscreen
use can lower your risk of skin cancers both among lighter-skinned people who are more
susceptible to skin cancer and people of color who are more likely to die from
skin cancer due to a delay in detection again that last bit about delay in
detection is correct but there is no evidence that regular sunscreen use
will lower the risk of skin cancer in people with dark skin and this also extends
a bit to other people of color too the link between sun exposure and skin cancer is
just a lot weaker than for white people now let's go on to these actual burning
questions again we see this misconception UVA rays penetrate the skin more deeply that part
is true but greater contributor to skin cancer is not it is really well established
that UVB is the greater contributor this is kind of like suggesting a myth but
they don't really quite say it UVA rays are aging rays there's this common idea that UVA
a stands for aging b stands for burning but that's not true both of them contribute to both
I already talked about how short wavelength UVA contributes to burning UVB also contributes
to aging UVB actually directly contributes to age spots by messing up the DNA of melanocytes
those cells that produce melanin at the bottom of their epidermis but picking a sunscreen that
protects against both UVA and B is good advice now this is a good point mineral sunscreens
aren't natural they get processed massively before they go into a product because you
need to get rid of things like contaminants but they do have this myth mineral sunscreens
work by creating a barrier on the skin that reflects UV rays and they mention this
related myth chemical sunscreens get absorbed into the skin and help create chemical
reactions that lead to repelling the UV rays there's no chemical reaction involved in
absorbing UV if the chemical sunscreen undergoes a reaction that is a bad thing it
means it's not photostable it's going to break down what happens is the electrons absorb the UV
and they get more energetic but the bonds don't actually change again if you want more info on
that check out my video on how sunscreens work there's pros and cons to each type that is true
regardless of what type of sunscreen you prefer make sure it's water and sweat resistant I
think water and sweat resistance is good but it's not really necessary I think for an
everyday sunscreen that you're wearing to the office water resistant sunscreens still
tend to be pretty uncomfortable because they form a really strong film that doesn't move as
much there's no standard for sweat resistance anywhere so a lot of the time you won't see this
on sunscreens and even if you do it's hard to tell what it means like how they tested it unless the
company literally tells you exactly what they did next they go through some of the pros and cons
of chemical versus mineral sunscreens and these are pretty good ones it is mostly about what you
prefer I like that they mentioned fragrance in the middle of this because that is an ingredient
that some people react to but it's kind of weird how they kind of say it is only a concern for
chemical sunscreens later on they do mention looking for a fragrance-free mineral sunscreen
though so maybe that was just awkward wording they have this bit on how much should
I spend on sunscreen and yeah you don't have to buy anything expensive or fancy this
bit with tints not materially changing the efficacy of the sunscreen I half agree
with this if you're just talking about SPF then that's true the SPF is what it
says on the package but that tint comes from iron oxide which does help with darker
skin if you have pigmentation problems iron oxide can absorb blue light which can
lead to longer lasting pigment changes how much SPF do I need they have the SPF
definition with time so again that's not quite correct because the sun changes
and again they have this thing with how going above SPF 30 is not going to give you
much additional protection which is not true they say apply sunscreen 30 minutes
before going outside that's probably overkill usually the recommendation
is 15 to 20 minutes and that's just to let it dry down form a complete film not
rub off and also to make sure you don't go into the sun and get a whole bunch of sun
exposure before you get the sunscreen on the best sunscreen option is one that
you'll readily use that is correct having a spray is better than nothing but
this bit reapply every two to four hours if you're in the sun that is not enough
pretty much every recommendation if you're spending time outdoors is reapply every
two hours or perhaps even more frequently I have seen this myth a few times times on
Australian websites and it is to do with the four hour water resistance rating but this
is not an Australian article an Australian four hour water resistant sunscreased will
still say to reapply every two hours because of that film wearing off honestly I
think they should change that water resistance rating to a different name
from four hours it's kind of misleading wear sunscreen on your face and neck every day
as UV rays can penetrate windows in your home and car I don't think this is really necessary
it depends on what your home is like I have a video on working out whether or not you need to
wear indoor sunscreen in the car I think you do because you have so much window space but in
your home if you're not sitting directly in the sun if you're quite far away from the
window you probably don't need sunscreen now this bit French and Korean sunscreens versus
American ones there is this idea I see a lot online still which is Korean sunscreens are less
reliable than ones from the US and I completely disagree the article says a few years ago there
were some Korean sunscreens that a company had tested by an independent laboratory and it did
not perform up to the label claim of the SPF this issue is really not limited to
Korea I've talked about it before in another video there are lots of consumer
magazines that do independent SPF testing on sunscreens they've purchased
and published the results Consumer Reports Which? Choice Consumer NZ and
every year there are a bunch that fail part of this is because SPF testing is
a biological test and there is usually more variation with that so there's
always been lots of variation between different SPF testing labs it depends
on the country what sorts of people are coming in and getting their skin tested
who's looking at when the skin goes pink but some of them do fall short by quite
a lot and it does feel weird to single out Korea when the biggest cause
of these fails is probably the US the biggest sunscreen testing scandal that's ever happened was with AMA Laboratories
in the US it's on the FDA website this lab was essentially committing
fraud for 30 years from 1987 until 2017 for SPF testing you need to have a certain
number of people you're testing on and they just pretended they had more people they just like
made up numbers so this means they could really speed up testing and they could also charge
a lot less so lots and lots of brands used them there's now even a special note in the
Australian regulations where it says if you got your sunscreens tested by this lab you
need to have new tests done by some date with the Korean sunscreens Odile Monod has
a video on that the issue seems to be they change from a tinted sunscreen to untinted
without retesting it and this is allowed in a lot of places around the world in Korea this
loophole seems to be fixed now and this is one really good thing about Korean regulators
they are very quick to deal with problems so I don't think this problem is really
relevant to Korean sunscreens anymore but sunscreens do fail testing all the time
including from the brands mentioned here and here are my rankings the longer
the article the more myths so I also calculated it as words per myth like a
measurement of myth sparseness and the longer articles ended up doing better
maybe because they were more padded out I also counted which myths came up the
most no surprise our grandpa myth topped it I made this sunscreen myth bingo card a
while back the stuff on the right is mostly crunchy social media myths so I didn't
really expect to do that well there but the ones on the left are the ones I've seen
from more trusted sources decent hit rate I did not expect these two myths
to come up as much as they did so overall the myths in these articles aren't
that bad but it is really frustrating to see these come up again year after year and still
not get corrected it'll be really nice to see a better hit rate over the years maybe
I'll just repeat this exercise every year I did have a couple of other articles from
Bloomberg and Reader's Digest which had really fear-mongering myths about the toxic effects
of sunscreen which I couldn't really fit into this video because I would have to go into a lot
more detail I'll probably talk about those soon but yeah I hope you found this interesting
in the meantime the most important things for finding a sunscreen look for a
sunscreen that's protective enough for whatever activity you're doing these
are the three labels you're looking for if you're doing something really sweat heavy
then go for the maximum for all of these second thing you're looking for is
the sunscreen that you enjoy enough to wear every day this includes things like
texture whether it irritates your skin even whether or not it fits in your budget
if you have a sunscreen that's really expensive that you skimp on that is not
good value if you have a sunscreen that was really cheap that you don't enjoy and
you never use that is also not good value see you next time there is a 50
50 chance it'll be about sunscreen