What you need to know about Sun Protection Factor (SPF) when selecting a lotion.
The first thing you should do in order to find out which kind of lotion you are about to invest in or put on your skin is to read on the front side label of the bottle. If the purpose and ingredients of a lotion are for sun protection, the letters SPF and a number are clearly printed. SPF means Sun Protection Factor and the number, which can be 15 up to 100, is a measure of how strong the protection is. The number represents how much longer time, without burning, you can stay in the sun with that lotion, compared to without any lotion.
Just to make an example: If you, with naked, unprotected, skin, under the conditions you are about to be in the sun, would burn after, let's say, 20 minutes, you should be able to stay 15 times longer without burning (develop erythema) with a SPF 15 lotion applied. That corresponds to 300 minutes or 5 hours.
Obviously, higher SPF than 15 is overkill at most locations. This is important because even if cosmetic companies and dermatologists try to convince you that the sun is so dangerous that you need stronger and stronger SPF-lotions, higher SPF means more chemicals. And the problem with that is, not only that the lotions becomes more expensive (and with that give more profit for the producers) but mainly that many of the chemicals used for creating the SPF, can be very harmful.
Blocking the rays from the sun can damage your health in more than one way
Another aspect of sunscreen lotions is that they block practically all UVB from reaching your skin. It means that they also block all possibilities for your body to create Vitamin D in a natural way. Many experts on Vitamin D claim that the overzealous use of SPF lotions is the main contributor to the widespread Vitamin D deficiency leading to increased risk for all kind of cancers and other maladies.
The basic, common, content in all body lotions
There is a general rule that whatever you put on your skin, you should also be able to safely digest. It takes only 30 seconds for the ingredients (assuming that their molecules are tiny enough to penetrate the skin) to reach the blood vessels and start to circulate in your body. This means that you should be just as demanding when selecting your lotions that you are (or at least should be) when deciding what to eat or not to eat.
Unfortunately, the rules for specifying the content of a lotion are not that well-defined as they are for food-products. To separate good and healthy lotions from junk-lotions demands some special knowledge, which you will get if you follow this series of articles.
All body-lotions, with or without any of the special components for, or against, tanning, contain some basic groups of ingredients.
The ingredient which you pay most for (i.e. that there is most of in the lotion) is the Base ingredient. This is very often water. The cheaper the lotion the more they contain of the base and the less of any active ingredients. A majority of the lotions you can buy in your drug-store or super-market, contains over 85% water. In very cheap lotions (
| Price : $68.00
