what is the 'very best' sunscreen?
i'm feeling burned
When you’re a kid, sunscreen is nothing more than a torture device aggressively implemented by caregivers whose sole mission in life is to violently interrupt your precious playtime by slathering your limbs and face (the horror) with the stinky, white gunk before releasing your slippery body back into the wild where it belongs.
When I was a kid, there were a finite number of sunscreen options, and they were differentiated by their ‘factor’ of sun protection (SPF). If you were translucent, like my mom, you reached for SPF30. If your sole purpose in life was to get tan like my dad, you used baby oil.
For kids, it was standard to use SPF15, which came from Coppertone (if you were fancy), or No-Ad (if you were anything like my family).
But these days there are so many sunscreen options that New York Magazine recently published an article which announced the 21 ‘very best’ sunscreens … for your face.
TWENTY-ONE? VERY? BEST? And they are only for my face? How many sunscreens must there be for the very best to include more than 20?
The Strategist article is well-researched, well-written, and clearly exhaustive — it includes sunscreens that address varying concerns (best budget, best for melanated skin, best for acne-prone skin, etc). And I’m sure these sunscreens are good. Maybe they are even the best! But I won’t ever know, because I’m too overwhelmed by the sheer (and matte) number of options to pick one from this list.
There is just. Too much. Stuff.
At one time in my life, I was on the other side of this pile of products. I’d sit at my desk during an awards show, fighting an inner battle over whether or not the gowns I liked were really worthy of going on the ‘best dressed’ list (there’s that B word again). 10 times out of 10, I would relent, thinking: This is my opinion. Not everyone has to agree with me.
But when it comes to product placement, how do we even know the products are based on someone’s opinion and not the publication’s relationship with that sunscreen’s PR person?
If People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” is not based on scientific sexy-calculations but rather on the perkiest email from a publicist whose client has a conveniently-timed project launching in tandem with the issue, what else are we being lied to about???
In my early freelancing days, I took an assignment that felt completely outrageous not only because of the modest (to put it lightly) paycheck, but by both the topic of the article and the number of items expected to be on the list: 60 of the best gifts for new moms.
Who is going to look through 60 gifts for new moms? I thought to myself, as I Googled “best gifts for new moms”. I did this because (you guessed it!) I was not a new mom. Sure, I mined my personal cadre of mothers for their best gifts, but ultimately I made a list of 60 things I thought were cool. And now it’s on the internet, forever (or for as long as we have the internet, or the site gets shut down by its corporate overlords, whatever comes first).
These roundups are big money makers for news organizations, which famously … are not great at making money. So of course, they have grown in ubiquity over the years. Because people click on them.
For those of us navigating the interminable, fluorescently-lit sunscreen aisle(s) at Target, we rely on these articles to help us sift through the dizzying array of plastic bottles.
But hasn’t this just become a viscous cycle? Are we clicking our way to an ever multiplying number of sunscreens?
Because we need sunscreen, and because we have unique dermatological concerns, and apparently because we like odd numbers, we click on listicles about sunscreen.
With the clicks come the profits, and thanks to these click-sticles, the lights can stay on at this last vestige of the Fourth Estate.
Now the digital editor schedules another meeting, and assigns more of these cash cows.
And more lists get compiled and published.
And more publicists send more and perkier emails.
And more companies make more products to add to the lists.
And the aisles at Target get even longer.
And whether or not they get bought, the bottles lining the shelves get thrown away, and more holes are formed in the ozone layer, and the power of the sun magnifies which means…
We. Need. More. Goddamned. Sunscreen.
Phewph. I’m exhausted.
In any event, I’m just glad everyone’s using sunscreen. I have one suggestion for the very best one: it's called NoAD.
That throwback photo of your parents is AWESOME! I’m so glad you’re continuing the conversation about sunscreen, especially as we head into fall/winter. It’s necessary 365/24/7.