Lifestyle | Beauty The Evening Standard's journalism is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of trying to find sensible skincare advice on TikTok, you may have stumbled across a trend in which influencers encourage their followers to skip sunscreen.
The spurious grounds for their strike on SPF vary but often centre around the idea that vitamin D can only be generated via unprotected skin, that our forefathers didn’t have sunscreens so surely we don’t actually need it, and that the chemicals are purportedly dangerous. I’ll quickly debunk all three. First, no sunscreen is 100 per cent effective so you’ll still generate some vitamin D, and taking supplements is much better than accruing sun damage.
Remember too that in the UK the sun is only strong enough to prompt your body to produce vitamin D between April and September so you will need some other plan to get enough of it (I supplement year round). Second, yes, sunscreen was invented in the Thirties by a mountaineer — but so what? Penicillin first emerged in the Twenties and I sure as hell am glad my time came after that. The notion that cancer was less prevalent back then having anything to do with suncream doesn’t bear weight when you consider other lifestyle changes that have occurred since and the impact they have on health.
Finally, the concern about chemicals is not relevant here, because SPF doesn’t .
