You can mix foundation with sunscreen… sometimes

This is a sponsored post. If you’re a skincare nerd, you’ll know that mixing foundation with sunscreen is a Bad Thing, even though a lot of people do it, and some brands even recommend it. While mixing a couple of drops of foundation in with your sunscreen solves a lot of problems (takes the edge off any white cast, removes …

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Do zinc sunscreens stop working and go toxic after 2 hours?

Chemical vs Physical Sunscreens: The Science (with video)

There’s a new paper on zinc oxide sunscreens not working and becoming toxic after 2 hours of UV exposure. A lot of people have sent me this paper, so here’s my analysis of it. In short, the researchers found that sunscreen ingredients broke down when mixed with zinc oxide and exposed to UV light, and the degraded mixtures had lower …

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How to Be a Sustainable Beauty Brand: Emma Lewisham Review

emma lewisham pump jar

This is a sponsored post. Sustainability and environmental impact is a huge topic in everything these days, and it’s a tricky topic. It’s obviously something that the vast majority of us care about, but a lot of companies are approaching it in a way that’s easy to market even though it doesn’t make a lot of scientific sense. There’s a …

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Do Hats and Umbrellas Protect Well From the Sun?

sun-protection-swiss-cheese

Instead of talking about sunscreen like I usually do, we’re going to dive into some of the things you can use to protect your skin apart from sunscreen (I can feel my sunscreen propaganda shillbucks slipping away right now). As much as we all love sunscreens, they are a bit of a pain in the butt. You have to apply them right, …

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Are You Washing Your Face Wrong? Busting Cleanser Myths

cleansing emulsification

I recently asked on my Instagram stories about cleansing myths, and I got back tons of replies! So here’s some cleanser mythbusting – unfortunately I couldn’t fit them all in this one post, but there’ll be a follow-up soon. A word of warning before we begin: the answer to a lot of these is going to be “it depends”. I …

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How much UV does a REAL mineral sunscreen absorb and scatter?

sunscreen center mount

Warning: Very nerdy content ahead! If you’ve been following sunscreen discourse (apparently this is a thing now) you’ll know that mineral sunscreens mostly work by absorbing UV and only scattering a small amount, in the region of 4-5% across the range of UV. This was quantified in a pretty commonly cited 2016 paper by Curtis Cole, Thomas Shyr and Hao Ou-Yang, “Metal …

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