For a few years in my wellness-culture era, I was a sunscreen skeptic. This was before Instagram, before influencers, and I don’t even know where I got the idea that sunscreen was somehow bad. It was just in the air in the crunchy-hipster circles I ran in back then, as a late-twentysomething in late-aughts Brooklyn. I remember lounging on the beach in the Rockaways and hearing friends confidently assert that they were letting their bare faces soak up much-needed sun, because the importance of vitamin D far outweighed any concern about future wrinkles (which were probably a myth, and something only our boomer moms cared about anyway). On their bodies, they slathered on “natural” tanning oils that had an SPF of 5 or less.
I never fully gave up using real sun protection on my body, but I only applied the bare minimum of my organic mineral sunscreen when I saw my skin starting to redden—sometimes after I’d already spent close to an hour in the baking sun. And I followed the lead of my friends with the unprotected faces, thinking for some reason that sun exposure would help improve my acne and even out scarring. (It didn’t, and now that I’m in my 40s I’m seeing the effects of my previously lackadaisical approach to sunscreen, though I’m doing my best not to get hung up on beauty culture’s unrealistic standards of aging.)
I finally started using sunscreen again a few years later, for largely cosmetic reasons: I decided wrinkles weren’t a myth, and I didn’t want them. Preventing skin cancer was also a secondary consideration, or maybe more of an afterthought. But then two of my family members had to have cancerous or precancerous growths on their skin removed, and I started taking sun protection much more seriously—a good thing, given that skin cancer is by far the most common kind of cancer in the U.S.
Today I use sunscreen on my face every day, and I apply it to other exposed skin before heading to the beach/pool or out on a walk.
But now there are legions of wellness influencers who promote avoiding sunscreen—or applying it in dangerously minimal ways, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s “highlighter” approach. Some say they want to get vitamin D naturally, rather than through supplements. Others cite not wanting to put “chemicals” on their skin (while still slathering them on in multi-step skincare routines, because literally everything in our world is made up of chemicals). In fairness, there have been some recent fear-inducing headlines about certain chemical compounds in sunscreen, so to some extent I can understand the anxiety.
But how much of a risk is this, really? And how does sunscreen actually affect vitamin D production? I dove into the evidence to find out. This is a shorter summary than usual thanks to some recent childcare and health issues, but here’s what I discovered.
