Baby Sun Screens and Sun Creams

And now a word or two about Sun-creams. All Sun-screens carry a Sun Protection Factor, usually abbreviated to SPF. This is followed by a number, generally between 4 and 25, although some products claim to go as high as SPF30 or more. OK, but what does this mean to the user.

Put simply, the higher the SPF value, the longer the user will be able to stay in the sun without visibly burning. As an example, if someone would normally start to burn after 15 minutes in the sun when unprotected, by using an SPF8 sun-cream they should be able to stay out for 2 hours without visibly burning. If they use a Factor 20 sun-cream, in theory they could stay in the sun for as long as 5 hours without visibly burning.

Sun-creams earn their SPF rating by including ingredients which filter out UV radiation and reduce it’s effect on the skin. Because it is UVB that causes most of the visible adverse effects of sun exposure, most commercial sun-creams concentrate just on filtering this out and pay little attention to UVA radiation. However, as already explained, it is UVA that does the most damage in the long term and which we need protection from.

It has been suggested that the use of sun-creams that only filter out UVB radiation has encouraged people to stay out in the sun far longer that they would otherwise do, and that this has unwittingly increased their exposure to UVA to such an extent as to lead to the dramatic increases in skin cancer that we are currently seeing. The moral of this has to be to only use sun-creams that filter out both UVB and UVA radiation.