By all means, study sunscreen ingredients further. But I’m far less concerned about substances with blood levels in the billionths of a gram than I am with severe solar damage to skin and skin cancers, especially melanoma.
While I absolutely understand that point, I don’t see it as an either/or proposition. I think concerned people should understand the risks of both – tanning beds and sunscreen.
I think sunscreen is presented a bit differently to consumers, though. Essentially, after about age six months, we’re all effectively told to bathe in it night and day. And many people who would be extremely hesitant to ever use a tanning bed are probably religious users of sunscreen.
Understanding the long-term consequences, if any, of the transdermal uptake of the chemicals in sunscreen has to take into consideration the cumulative effect, particularly understanding how long the constituent chemicals stay in the body with, literally, decades of regular use.
The sources that warn us of the risk of tanning beds often hammer home the absolute necessity of regular and liberal use of sunscreen. Understanding those risks seems important to me.
Toxic levels of hyperbole could be quite harmful to our mental health.
You only have to put it where the burn risk is.
Not completely allover your body by the gallon.
I’ve reduced my use by wearing clothes that cover my arms and legs. My hands and face and maybe ankles. Tops of the feet are susceptible.
Yes, I wear shorts and no sleeves, just not when I’m out in the sun for a long period.
That you recognized it as hyperbole gives me confidence that others will, too.
ETA: but the recommendations may surprise some:
ETA2: and, really, the comment about “after age six months” wasn’t entirely hyperbolic:
Minimize sunscreen use on children younger than six months old.
Maybe it’s just because I live in Australia, but those recommendations are completely familiar and normal to me. Like using toothpaste with fluoride, or iodized salt. Better living through chemicals!
Tanning beds are illegal here, FWIW.
Everything else wants to kill you but get rid of tanning beds? 
Okay, I agree they have little real use.
I met a family from Egypt on the beach a few years back. The father noticed me vaping, and he offered to pay for my drinks in exchange for me sharing my cannabis.
His wife and daughter were wearing outfits that covered their entire bodies. I asked if they were hot, but the material was designed to block the sun, yet be cool. I immediately researched and bought a few long sleeve/hooded beach shirts.
The daughter was in her late teens. She asked me my religion (and her father rebuked her for prying). I told her I was an atheist and she and her father were thrilled to discuss it (mom went for a walk). Back home they would never think of talking about the subject.
The AADA link you provided prominently recommends the following measures in addition to sunscreen use to protect skin:
- Seek shade. The sun’s rays are strongest between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. If your shadow is shorter than you are, seek shade.
- Wear sun-protective clothing such as a lightweight and long-sleeved shirt, pants, a wide-brimmed hat, and sunglasses with UV protection, when possible. For more effective sun protection, select clothing with an ultraviolet protection factor (UPF) number on the label.
- Avoid tanning beds. Ultraviolet light from the sun and tanning beds can cause skin cancer and wrinkling. If you want to look tan, you may wish to use a self-tanning product, but continue to use sunscreen with it.
- Use extra caution near water, snow, and sand as they reflect the damaging rays of the sun, which can increase your chance of sunburn.
I must have missed the part about “bathing in (sunscreen) night and day”.
*I’ve been fortunate not to have developed any skin cancers thus far (protective clothing, limiting sun exposure between mid-morning and late afternoon and judicious use of sunscreen are my main strategies). The only advice I can recall getting from a dermatologist on this subject was (and I quote) “a hat is your friend” - apparently this particular dermo had seen a lot of scalp cancers.
The larger point is very simple.
I’m not sure that we know what long-term effects, if any, there are to regular – often daily or more frequently – application of sunscreens, often for decades and probably often starting at a very early age.
Maybe it’ll turn out to be the elixir of the Gods, and will permanently sustain life.
Or maybe it’ll turn out to be more like cigarettes, where no number of cigarettes smoked in a day is good for you, and where the harm begins – to a degree – as soon as you start.
The point is that we don’t know. That would be the “steel man argument.”
Or it won’t be either of those ludicrously hyperbolic extremes, and instead win up a tradeoff between known serious cancer risks of excessive sun exposure and disputed increased risk of some disorder(s) - or no proven significant detriments at all.
We seem to have gotten away from the subject of tanning bed “benefits”.
I defined a continuum, and mentioned that we don’t know where on that continuum it’s likely to fall.
Steel man argument. Give it a whirl. Seriously.
I don’t mean to cast shade on the beliefs of the sunscreen-fearful, but it’s glaringly obvious that overexposure to misinformation blinds people to sunscreen’s benefits and they get burned by bad advice.
Dang, paywalled and I really wanted to read it. Thanks anyway.
I’m not sure to whom that was addressed but my point – bolstered by your article – is quite simple: we don’t know.
Thanks for that.
ETA: and nobody in this discussion is denying the benefit. I’m saying that any risk are not well-understood.
Where does the article say we shouldn’t use sunscreen because “we don’t know” (about postulated harm)? Key points are that people don’t use it because of unjustified fears, or don’t use it properly.
Where did I say that?
Hint: I didn’t.
I said that we don’t know what long-term risks, if any, are associated with regular use of sunscreen.
Jack? Feel free to continue arguing against things that you wish I had said, rather than what I actually have said.
I’ll leave you to it.
And I’ll leave you to ask your dermatologist (or any dermatologist) why they recommend sunscreen as something patients should be “bathing in day and night” (as you put it), and why they don’t warn against it as something likely to be as harmful as smoking (again, what you’ve suggested here).
The response should be interesting, hope you’ll share it.
Here are brief excerpts from the long Wired article:
All existing research suggests that the benefits of sunscreen heavily outweigh any potential harms, yet distrust is on the rise—only 55 percent of Australian adults, one of the most sun-exposed populations on Earth, believe sunscreen is safe to use every day. That wariness meant last year, many turned to online recipes to create their own, wholly ineffective versions at home.
(Note: another unrelated article today said life expectancy is four years longer in Australia than the US.)
Skin cancer has long been one of the most prevalent cancers, and cases have been swelling over the past few decades. Less fatal varieties—such as basal and squamous cell skin cancers—make up the bulk of those cases. But what’s also seeing an uptick is melanoma, which is far more rare and also far more deadly. If trends continue as they are, cases of melanoma are expected to increase by 50 percent by 2040—and deaths by nearly 70 percent. The United Kingdom just reached an all-time high in melanoma cases.
A variety of reasons are behind the increase. It can partly be attributed to better screening and an aging population—age is a general risk factor for cancer. But researchers also point to other social behaviors, such as the advent of package holidays to sunny countries…
Much of the increase in melanoma cases will be concentrated in parts of the world with light-skinned populations, including Australia and New Zealand, North America, and Europe.
That means that adopting sun-protective behaviors—sunscreen included—will be crucial in the coming years. But people are, for the most part, terrible at applying sunscreen. They wear about half as much as they should; they miss spots; they rub it in vigorously instead of gently, which can decrease the protection it offers—its sun protection factor, or SPF—by up to a fifth. (People also don’t really understand what SPF means; it’s not a measure of how long you can stay out in the sun. SPF basically just says how much the sunscreen blocks out [mostly UVA rays]…)
…But a mushrooming reason behind poor uptake is fear over harms. The anti-sunscreen movement has gained traction, spreading fear over just how safe sunscreen actually is, and whether you’d be better off frying in the sun.
…Chemical, or organic, sunscreens, which have been particularly villainized in recent years, are often criticized for their harsh-sounding, impossible-to-pronounce ingredients: words like homosalate, octocrylene, octinoxate, octisalate. Mineral sunscreens, on the other hand—better described as inorganic—only feature two main ingredients: zinc oxide and titanium dioxide. “There are a lot of organizations that are quite pseudoscientific, and they tend to always fear-monger about sunscreen ingredients. And a lot of it is simply because the names sound scary,” she says.
It means that mineral sunscreens are often held up as the “cleaner” option, when there’s no good evidence that either is harmful. (There is little also evidence of harm to coral reefs or vitamin D synthesis, as is sometimes argued.)
…Today, we know that sunscreen does prevent cancer for light-skinned populations. But we also know that sunscreen is no panacea. It’s typically the third listed line of defense of sun protection, after seeking shade and avoiding sun exposure at peak times—but it’s usually the one people make their first. Wong recommends a Swiss cheese model approach; each method has their imperfections (or holes like Swiss cheese), but layering them together will give you a good, even layer of protection. Even just wearing a bit more coverage makes a big difference: “Most clothes do a much better job than sunscreen,” says Neale.
The fallibility of sunscreen is something that a country like Australia—uniquely vulnerable to the harms of the big fireball in the sky—has long understood. It first launched its famous Slip, Slop, Slap campaign 40 years ago…
The “debate” over sunscreen needs to be viewed in the context of dangerous misinformation spread by social media influencers.