complexions, red or blond hair, and birthmarks and moles are especially at risk.
Ultraviolet radiation is one of the main risk factors for melanoma. Wet, there’s no need to go
overboard and completely shun the sun, hiding inside and slathering cupfuls of sunscreen lotions
every hour, as some ardent antisun experts recommend. Everything is good in moderation, and not a
single sunscreen can completely shield you from skin aging or cancer.
The Dark Secret About Sunscreens
It’s a given fact that sunscreens prevent sunburn. However, there has never been epidemiological
or laboratory evidence that most common sunscreens, including para-aminobenzoic acid (PABA),
invented in 1922, prevent either melanoma or basal cell carcinoma in humans. All we know so far is
that the same mechanism that causes sunburn may also trigger the formation of skin cancer. Sunburn by
itself doesn’t cause skin cancer, but it signals a harmful, excessive exposure to the sun.
Worldwide, the countries where chemical sunscreens have been recommended and adopted have
experienced the greatest rise in skin cancers, with a simultaneous rise in death rates. In the United
States, Canada, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries, melanoma rates have skyrocketed, with the
greatest increase occurring after the introduction of sunscreens at the end of the 1970s. According to
the National Center for Health Statistics, death rates in the United States from melanoma doubled in
women and tripled in men between the 1950s and the 1990s; yet melanoma remains a relatively rare
type of cancer, killing twenty times fewer people than lung cancer (Miniño et al. 2007).
Could it be that sunscreens promote skin cancers instead of preventing them? Absolutely not, but
there is something about sunscreens that needs careful attention. One explanation could be the
ineffectiveness of sunscreens made in the 1980s and 1990s. Older formulations did not provide
protection from all spectrums of the sun’s radiation. Those sunscreens shielded more from burning
UVB rays but did almost nothing about the more damaging UVA exposure. Both UVA and UVB types
of sun radiation have been shown to mutate DNA and promote skin cancers in animals (Rass,
Reichrath 2008). UVA also penetrates deeper and stimulates melanocytes at a much higher rate, yet
for some reason UVA dangers were ignored. Slathered in sunscreen, people stayed in the sun longer
without having proper protection, often over a period of ten or twenty years, before clinical
symptoms of skin cancer appeared.
To understand why sun protective ingredients aren’t able to actually protect us from skin cancer,
let’s first see if there’s any difference between sunscreens and sunblocks. Sunscreens are a group of
chemicals that get under our skin to absorb sun rays. They first need to get absorbed by skin so they
can then absorb photons of sun radiation. Sunscreens usually contain benzophenones, such as
oxybenzone, which protect against UVA, and salicylate and octyl methoxycinnamate, which protect
against UVB. A major drawback of these sunscreen ingredients is that they break down after several
hours of exposure to sunlight, which means you need to reapply them often, exposing yourself to a
host of preservatives, penetration enhancers, petrochemicals, and artificial fragrances. Even when
broad-spectrum sunscreens (ones that provide protection from both UVA and UVB sun radiation)
were introduced in the early 1990s, they failed to completely shield us from harmful doses of sun
radiation. High SPF factor gives us a false sense of security. The logic is simply deceptive: if a lotion
with SPF15 allows you to stay in the scorching sun fifteen times longer, then lotion with SPF50
would give a whopping fifty times more protection. Right? Wrong.