What no one tells you about SPF

That perfect feeling as the suns warmth dances across our skin.

A feeling most people enjoy, a call to arms to shed the layers & soak up the glorious rays. 

What a lot of people aren’t aware of however, is that exposure to the sun & UV light without adequate protection not only causes pigmentation & potential skin cancer to name a few but also causes up to 90% of visible aging.

It doesn’t matter the time of year, the UVA is ever present, always lurking & ready to hit you with sun damage, every time you step outside, even if the UVB is biding its time over our long winters. 

Sun damage can look like;

- Unusually dry skin – the UV breaks down the skins ability to generate & retain moisture, leading to flaky, dry skin & enhanced wrinkles.

- The obvious one, sunburn – this is an injury to the skin - just as a tan is a form of scar in response to UV exposure.

- Plus Photoaging – some are more susceptible than others, but no one is free from its clutches – this is premature aging caused by the sun, & presents as coarse wrinkles, rough texture, increased fragility & blotchy pigmentation.

We can usually tell if someone wears sunglasses regularly, as the skin around their eyes isn’t as wrinkled, & aged for the amount of times they've been around the sun - more so, if they don't wear SPF on the face.

Of if you don’t apply SPF in general just by looking at your skin, and we can see how deep this reaches using our digital light imaging device. 

But, a way for you to to see the damage yourself is assessing your window side from driving your car, you can probably expect to see more pigment presenting on that arm, and side of your face if you haven't taken fancy to the old slip, slop, slap.

Below are some really stark statistics on more dire outcomes from not applying SPF correctly...

- 2 out of 3 Australians have the chance of being diagnosed with skin cancer by the time they’re 70.

- …. or more scarily put – 1 person every 30 minutes will be diagnosed with melanoma.

- 1 person every 6 hours will die.

- and melanoma is the most common type of cancer for those between 20-39 years of age. 

- 95% of melanomas are caused by over exposure to UV from the sun. 

So you can see why we harp on about being sun smart - it's not just to preseve your largest organ from premature aging, but it could save your life.

So the first thing you must stop, to start protecting yourself is applying SPF incorrectly & understand exactly the how & why of SPF. 

Did you know that we each have our own burn time in the sun? 

To understand SPF & how it works, you first need to know how SPF is calculated. 

The golden rule: How many minutes it takes your skin to burn without any protection multiplied by the SPF factor.

Let’s say, for example, when you are in the sun with no protection you burn in 5 minutes, this means when you apply SPF 30 your total burn time is thirty times your burn time (5 minutes) and, in this case, 150 minutes or 2.5 hours a day.

The most important part of this equation? 

After this time, no amount of SPF can protect you, no matter how many times you re-apply. 

Think of it like cooking a chicken in the oven, when it’s cooked, it’s cooked! 

If you take it out of the oven to cool and then put it back in, it will burn, just like your skin when your burn time is up.

Stay tuned for our next blog on what to do once you are sunburnt – as even the best laid plans can go awry & how to take yourself from a cooked chicken, facing cellular destruction, to supporting & repairing your skin & DNA.