I can’t help you with a brand, but I am a redhead with “classic” redhead skin and I burn in 20 minutes when I use my current brand which is an SPF 35. Nothing I can’t live with, but after an hour I’d be fried>blister>miserable. So I just stay out of the sun. I wear hats and sit in the shade and so on and so forth. But that is not the point of this post. THIS is…
The other day, I was watching something or other on TV and this Doctor said something that astounded me. (I’m a skin type I, sounds like you are too.) Look at number 3.
It says it should take approximately a shot glass full of sunscreen to cover the exposed parts of your body. That is a LOT of sunscreen. AND you need to reapply it every two hours or after swimming or perspiring heavily. [sub]Ummm…Hello? When it is hot, which is why you need the sunscreen, don’t you perspire heavily as soon as you go out in the sun?[/sub] From what the Doc on the show said, they aren’t talking about full body exposure like when you wear a bikini…so we are only talking about what would be exposed wearing shorts and a tank top.
Now I don’t know about you, but I have never even come CLOSE to using that much sunscreen to cover my legs, arms and chest/face. This might explain why I burn so bad when wearing heavy-duty SPF sunscreen. Good to know, and now I’ll be slathering the stuff on with a trowel and sitting under bushes if an umbrella isn’t available. Or maybe I’ll just stay home with a good book.
OTOH, it may work better just because you are inside all day trying to get your skin to absorb all that lotion and never get around to actually being IN the sun more than ten minutes at a time. :smack:
I’m with ** Harriet **. I am the palest of the pale, and I can wear that Coppertone Sport SPF 48 all day long, and not get a touch of color. For me there is no option, it’s either white, or red. I’m gonna try that spray-on tan.
I don’t have any cites for this, but I think that people died from most things in nearly the same levels THEN that they die from NOW. Some if it, I think, was misdiagnosed or labeled incorrectly (for example, they used to label everything to do with lung problems as “consumption”…which probably included lung cancer and TB and so forth. Then there is the fact that people are living so much longer. I have read articles that indicate that if you live long enough and you have unfortunate genes, you WILL get cancer. What follows, of course, is that if you die from other causes before those genes have the time to do their dirty work, you wouldn’t have died from cancer.
So I think that most likely melanoma WAS as much (or nearly as much) of a killer then as it is now. Yes, the environment is a concern and maybe things have gotten worse in terms of cancers caused by outside elements. But my own personal feeling is that it isn’t as much of a statistical increase as some people think.
Again, this is just my own personal opinon, formed by lots of things I have read over the years. I might be totally, completely and insanely wrong.
I remember PABA, which I think stood for rho aminio benzoic acid, rho being the Greek letter. One summer it was God’s gift to sunscreen, and all of them proclaiming, “With PABA!!!” Then there must have been some research, because the same brands the next year were bragging, “PABA Free!!!” without the slightest hint of apology.
I’m constantly amused by SPF 0 products, which, by their own definition, should cause your skin to burn instantly on contact.
This isn’t a spray on, but I have to recommend Ocean Potion Baby spf 50 (here’s a picture: Coming Back Soon | Ocean Potion Suncare ). I know that anything over 30 is probably a crock, but I like the baby one because it’s unscented. Yes! I detest sunblock that smells like coconut/banana/‘tropical’ anything, which most of them do. This one is unscented, lasts pretty much all day, and feels like water; it’s not greasy at all (this is my #1 demand for sunblock since I don’t have air conditioning at home and damned if I’m gonna feel greasy and nasty indoors as well!).
I had completely forgotten about PABA! That may have been what cher3 remembered, because that stuff was in everything. IIRC the stuff worked well as a sunscreen. I think they discovered that there was a high possiblity that it caused cancer. Back then, if you mentioned cancer in relation to a product, it would be gone overnight.
And I was wrong in my earlier product endorsment. It’s SPF 35. And it has a light clean smell, no bananas!
My mom and her sisters, who are now in their 50s and 60s, grew up in Southern California and spent long, long hours sunning at the beach as teenagers. (Sidenote: my mom’s family is of Irish extraction, with the associated skin tone.) Now they all have to go to the doctor every once in a while and get precancerous patches zapped off their bodies. My grandpa got skin cancer on the top of his head (he was a golfer). So I imagine the sun was just as bad “back in the old days”, just people didn’t realize it.
I wear sunblock on my face even in the winter (naturally, I inherited my mom’s pale skin instead of my dad’s dark olive. Thanks, genetics!). I am paranoid.
