The SPF figure related to the particular product that you are planning to protect your skin or that of your family with gives you some indication of how much protection that particular product offers.
When buy a sun protection product, you are either going to buy a ‘sunscreen’ or ‘sunblock’ solution and the constituent ingredients of the two different types of some protection product are a little different. To understand this concept, you must first of all appreciate that there are two different groups of sun protection ingredients which display different qualities.
On the one hand, you have ingredients that constitute a chemical ultraviolet block, something that has the capacity to be absorbed into the skin which protects you by nullifying or invalidating the potentially harmful effects of ultraviolet light on contact with the skin.
On the opposite side of the coin, there are physical block ingredients which do not have the capability of being absorbed into the skin. However, these physical blockers protect the skin either by absorbing the potentially harmful elements of sunlight into the block (a little like a sponge soaking up and then retaining water) or by reflecting those harmful elements away from the body in a similar way to using a mirror to reflect sunlight.
A commercially produced sunscreen product will generally tend to use more chemical ultraviolet protection ingredients, and has an SPF factor of 2 or more. Incidentally, an SPF factor 2 protective product would not offer a great deal of protection at all as the bigger the SPF number is, the more protection is provided.
On the other hand, a sunblock product is one that uses physical blocking ingredients to protect against sunlight, and it will have an SPF of 12 or more, which is obviously a far higher level of protection than that required of sunscreen products.
The SPF number is designed to indicate how much protection that particular product offers against UVB light with reference to how much of this particular form of ultraviolet light is necessary to turn the skin of an ‘average’ person red.
And whilst it is impossible to know how you compare with this hypothetical ‘average’ individual, it is generally suggested that the protection offered is the number of minutes that you acan spend in the sun when the SPF factor is multiplied by 10.
As an example, an SPF factor 12 product would allow our hypothetical average friend to stay in the sun for 120 minutes (12 x 10 minutes), whereas a factor 20 product would offer him or her 200 minutes of sun time.
The upshot of this is that a sunscreen or sunblock product that is SPF1 is going to allow skin that has not been exposed to the sun for a long time to turn red in 10 minutes or so, whereas something that carries an SPF50 label is going to prevent sun induced redness for a very long period of time.
However, do remember that these time guidelines are nothing more than a general idea of how long you can stay out in the sun, so don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can enjoy every last minute of your ‘available sun time’ irrespective of how you feel.
Nevertheless, although the SPF rating system is designed to provide a guideline about how much UVB light anyone who has used a particular sun protection product can tolerate, many products now also include ingredients to protect against UVA light as well.
This is as you would expect given that there is now a strong suspicion (or even believe) that UVA radiation is also responsible for causing skin damage and cancer.
The problem with most commercially produced sunscreens and sunblocks is that the majority use a wide range of chemical ingredients to make up their particular brand mix, and there are suspicions that not all of these ingredients are necessarily safe.
For example, there is a very comprehensive list of all of the most common commercial sun protection products in the USA and Canada on the Drugs.com site (even outside the USA and Canada, many of these products will be instantly recognizable).
Next to each product listed, there is a key to the main chemical ingredients in each product listed. This example is the top of the US section of the page, with the key number highlighted for the top two entries:
Every one of these products contains titanium dioxide, a very commonly used substance that is found in paper, paints, plastics and ink as well as toothpaste because of its opacity and whitening qualities.
However, according to this article published on the Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety website, titanium dioxide is now classified as an IACR Group 2B carcinogen by the International Agency for Cancer Research which officially means that it is a ‘possible carcinogen to humans’.
Titanium dioxide is a substance that is used in many commercially produced sun protection products including many that are recommended or specifically designed for babies and children. And whilst there is no specific proof that the substance is a proven either here or you will you are that you are acancer threat to human beings, it is reasonable to suggest that the IACR would not have issued this warning without sufficient grounds for doing so.
If you run through this list and then do some more online research into the potential adverse side-effects of some of the chemical ingredients that are used in commercial sun protection products, you will find many similar stories about other chemicals.
There are a couple more examples here and here just in case the idea of trying to protect your skin against sunburn, melanoma and other skin cancers by applying ‘protection’ that contains ingredients that could potentially cause cancer does not give you enough food for thought.
There is another relevant factor to take into account here as well. The result of an experiment which was published in 2006 compared the level of reactive oxygen species (ROS – free radicals that are known to have a connection with cancer) on skin that had been treated with a sun protection product as against skin that had no such protection.
During the first 20 minutes of the test, the protected skin fared much better than the skin which had not been treated with considerably lower levels of ROS shown. After 60 minutes however, the amount of sunscreen that had been absorbed into the skin meant that the level of ROS present on the treated skin area was now considerably higher than that of the non-treated control skin.
From all of the preceding information, it is clear that there could be some degree of risk attached to using commercially produced sun protection products as there is at least evidence to suggest that some of the chemical-based ingredients are not necessarily 100% safe in all situations and circumstances.
Of course, the individual level of risk to the vast majority of people from using preparations that contain chemical substances that have been indicated to have potentially adverse side-effects is extremely small, because it is a fact that thousands (perhaps even millions) of sun lovers all over the world use these products each and every day without any deleterious reactions whatsoever.
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