I recently review a bunch of popular Korean sunscreens for a sponsored video, because most of you are heading into summer in the northern hemisphere. Conveniently I’m heading out of summer, so I’ve actually been trying out tons of sunscreens, and there are some really nice ones in this batch – including a few you’ve probably seen hyped up a …
A lot of my favourite sunscreens aren’t the most budget-friendly. Unfortunately sunscreen testing and development is pretty expensive, and if you want to formulate an SPF product that’s really pleasant to use as well as being effective, it can be a long expensive process of trial and error. Enter: economy of scale. We have two major supermarkets in Australia: Coles …
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 …
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 …
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 …
There are so many myths around mineral or physical sunscreens – the ones with zinc oxide and titanium dioxide – and how they’re supposedly better than chemical sunscreens with scarier names like oxybenzone and octocrylene. And it’s usually zinc oxide that gets all the hype. Some of these advantages are true… but so many are just myths. And a lot …
There’s been a recent study published about the sunscreen ingredient octocrylene turning into benzophenone over time. According to the paper, “benzophenone is a mutagen, carcinogen, and endocrine disruptor”. I wasn’t going to do a proper analysis of this paper because it only really got lots of attention in France and not many other places, but then I saw that I …
Being the “sunscreen nerd” person, I get a lot of questions about unusual sunscreen products and whether or not their claims work out. Last time I talked about the Colorescience powder sunscreen and the Skinnies “pea-sized amount” claim. Related post: Do They Work? Colorescience SPF Powder, Skinnies “Pea-Sized Amount” (with video) This time I’m talking about two more products that people …