Sunscreen as a non-negotiable

I am thirty-five years old and I have been wearing daily sunscreen for exactly four years. Before that I wore sunscreen at the beach. The thirty-one years of non-beach days when I did not wear sunscreen are visible, now that I am looking for them, in the small patches of pigmentation along the top of my cheekbones and the slightly papery texture of the skin under my eyes.

I am not in catastrophe about this. The damage is mild and is the damage of an ordinary indoor-mostly life in a temperate country. But the damage is real and the cost of preventing more of it is small, and so the daily sunscreen has become, for me, the one product in the routine that is not negotiable.

What I use

A mineral sunscreen with about twenty percent zinc oxide, SPF 50, from a small Korean brand. It is the only one I have found that does not leave a white cast on my skin and does not feel heavy under makeup. It costs about thirty euros for a tube that lasts me two and a half months. The maths is good.

I keep it in two places. One bottle in the bathroom, applied after moisturiser, before makeup. One smaller bottle in the small tray by the front door, for reapplication if I have been out for more than three hours. The second bottle is the one I forget most often and which I am still, four years in, trying to make automatic.

Why mineral

I tried chemical sunscreens for a year and my skin did not like any of them. There is no good reason for this, my skin is not particularly sensitive, but chemical sunscreens consistently caused a low-grade tightness and small bumps along my jaw within a few days of use. The mineral sunscreens have never done this.

Both types work. Both have been studied. Chemical sunscreens are usually thinner and more elegant on the skin, mineral sunscreens are usually more reliable for sensitive skin and have a slightly broader spectrum at the longer UVA wavelengths. The right choice is the one that you will actually use every day. For me that turned out to be mineral.

On the cloudy days

I used to skip sunscreen on cloudy days, on the theory that the clouds were doing the work. They are not. About eighty percent of UVA gets through cloud cover. UVA is the long-wavelength radiation that does the cumulative pigmentation and texture damage, not the burns. The cloudy days are, for the slow damage, almost as bad as the sunny days.

So the sunscreen goes on every day. Even in November. Even when it is raining. Even on the days I am only going to the bakery. The four years of consistency has not yet produced a transformation but it has, I am fairly confident, prevented an additional four years of damage I would otherwise be looking at.