Is Sunscreen Bad for You?

Pay enough attention to the dialogue around natural beauty in this country, and you’ll start to notice there’s an anti-SPF movement afoot. Anti-sunscreeners pop up in Mommy Facebook groups and write op-eds on TreeHugger.com. Some of them are very famous: Several years ago, Gisele Bündchen called sunscreen “poison,” adding that she protects her skin by not going outside after 8 a.m. “I do not use anything synthetic,” she explained. (She later walked these comments back,saying she just tries to look for “more natural options.”) A Pilates teacher once advised me, in the middle of doing a move called “the clam,” to use tomato seeds as SPF. More recently, Lululemon tried to hide its anti-sunscreen agenda on its platitude-printed reusable shopping bags. “Sunscreen absorbed into the skin might be worse for you than sunshine,” it boldly said, right next to “Do one thing a day that scares you.”

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