Popular sunscreen claims graded against the actual evidence.
This page has no affiliate links. We link to regulators, published studies, and our own articles. Are Korean sunscreens safe? Here is what the regulators have said. Korea’s cosmetics regulator lists 32 permitted UV filters, each with a concentration limit, and EU scientific committees have published safety opinions on some of them. The question keeps…
Is sunscreen bad for you? In 2026 that stopped being a fringe question. The American Academy of Dermatology’s Practice Safe Sun survey (1,132 U.S. adults, polled online in early 2026) reported “more than 16 million adults reporting reducing or stopping sunscreen use because of online claims,” a figure the AAD estimated from a national survey.[6]…
Type “homemade sunscreen” into Google and the autocomplete finishes the sentence for you: recipe, with zinc oxide, for face. Most recipes come with a number attached, SPF 20 here, SPF 30 there. What is harder to find is anyone who made one and put it under a lab instrument. A few research groups have, and…
Search “sunscreen pills” and two completely different conversations come back. One is about sunscreen pilling, the little balls that roll up when sunscreen meets the wrong moisturizer. That one is a texture problem, and we handled it separately in why sunscreen pills up on oily skin. This article is about the other one: capsules you…
Does sunscreen prevent aging, and how much of what you have read about it matches the papers underneath? We went to the primary sources and read them directly: the one randomized controlled trial that measured skin aging, two studies that took biopsies instead of photographs, a one-year study on whether existing damage can improve, and…
An anti-pollution Korean sunscreen carries two claims on the same tube, and they come from different worlds. Dewytree’s Urban Shade Anti-Pollution Sun is labeled SPF 50+ PA++++, and its listing separately advertises “39.1% Reduction in fine dust adherence verified by the Skin Med Clinical Trials Center. (2021.03.17)”[5] Both numbers are printed with the same confidence….
“Sunscreen causes cancer” trended on social media again this summer. Does sunscreen cause cancer? The claim has two legs, and both rest on things that actually happened. Sunscreen filters really are absorbed into the bloodstream; regulators confirmed it. Skin cancer rates really did climb through decades of rising sunscreen use; cancer registries record it. What…
Three days at the beach. Sunscreen on before breakfast, reapplied like a chore you actually did, and the strap mark on your shoulder says the tan happened anyway. The internet splits into two camps about this, and both camps are wrong. One says the bottle failed you. The other says a tan you picked up…
An alcohol-free Korean sunscreen claim traces back to one database tag. We opened 40 listings, counted every ingredient list, and read every tag.
Two sunscreens, one over the other. SPF 30 underneath, SPF 50 on top, and somewhere in the back of your head a small calculator reports SPF 80. That number isn’t real. The problem is that the usual correction, deciding layering is therefore pointless, isn’t real either. Both of those can be wrong at the same…