Sunscreen 101: how best to protect your children’s skin and your own this summer
Proper protection against the sun’s harmful rays not only preserves your complexion – it reduces the risk of suffering skin cancer. Here’s what you need to know about choosing sunscreens, and other steps to take for protection
I was brought up in the carefree, hatless 1970s, when caution was abandoned and sun block barely invented. My mother smeared a thick white paste called Uvistat on our noses. There was no such thing as “waterproof” and we burned often – I remember the skin on my shoulders bubbling with blisters after a particularly long day in the sun.
Forty years later and I could not conceive of such sunny abandonment of my own children’s skincare in the sun, especially given that my youngest is a redhead with skin the colour of clotted cream.
I have made sun protection a life mission to preserve my children’s complexions so that they don’t look as weathered as I do come my age. Proper sun protection also decreases the chances of getting melanoma skin cancer after too much exposure to the sun, which can be a killer in worst-case scenarios.
Paediatric melanomas are extremely rare, says Dr Jennifer Stein, a dermatologist at NYU Langone in the United States, but “children do need sun protection because childhood sunburns have been linked to melanoma later in life”.
So how do you protect your children’s skin – and your own – to preserve not just a great complexion but possibly your health later on, too?
