It’s the night before a camping trip and there are two bottles on the counter. One is your sunscreen. The other is bug spray. Tomorrow they’re both going on the same arm, and you have about three seconds to decide which one goes on first. Good news: sunscreen and insect repellent is one of the…
“Just wear a shirt instead” is good advice attached to the wrong shirt. The plain white tee most people picture has been measured, and it isn’t the one doing the work. The short version: UPF clothing vs sunscreen isn’t really a contest, because they cover different parts of you. UPF is a rating for fabric,…
People pack differently for a desert trip than for a beach one, and they usually pack the wrong thing. The instinct is to reach for something more water-resistant, or a higher number. Neither is the thing that fails you in dry air. What fails is the surface you’re putting it on. The short version: picking…
The most common way sunscreen fails in the tropics isn’t the one people plan for. It isn’t washing off in the sea, and it isn’t sweating away on a hike. It’s that the stuff feels so unpleasant by 10am that you stop putting it on. An SPF 50 you skipped is an SPF 0. The…
Most of a Tocobo sunscreen line guide should be about which product suits you. Most brand line guides are about texture instead. Pick the cream if you like creams, the stick if you want something portable, and the protection underneath is assumed to be the same. For Tocobo it isn’t. We read both ingredient lists…
Go looking for how much stronger UV gets as you climb and you’ll find a tidy answer everywhere: about 10% per 1,000 metres. The WHO says exactly that.[1] Then you find the US Environmental Protection Agency saying about 2% per 1,000 feet, which works out closer to 6.6% per 1,000 m.[2] And the Hong Kong…
The study that gets cited for UV detection stickers opens by saying the quiet part out loud. Sunscreen applied at the recommended 2 mg/cm² has been shown to block UV damage in vivo, the authors write, but “in real world conditions, however, sunscreen is often not applied/reapplied sufficiently to yield protection.”[1] That’s the problem these…
It’s 11 a.m. at the pool. You put sunscreen on at home, you’ve been in twice, you’ve dried off on a lounger, and someone just said the bottle says 80 minutes so everyone’s fine until one o’clock. Are you? The bottle isn’t lying. But that number was earned in a very specific room, a public…
Two filters. Line up the ingredient lists for Anessa’s Perfect UV Skincare Milk and Beauty of Joseon’s Relief Sun and that’s all they share at the filter level: Uvinul A Plus and Uvinul T 150. Nine filters on one label, four on the other, two names in common. Which is why an Anessa vs Korean…
Ask an eyewear shop why your glasses keep sliding down, and plenty of them will name your sunscreen. Then they’ll tell you to keep it off the bridge of your nose. That does stop the sliding. It also leaves one of the most sun-exposed strips of your face with nothing on it, every day, for…