Summarize up to four sentences.: What’s Behind the Rise of the Sunscreen Truther?
For conspiracy-minded wellness contrarians, the cure for sunburn is worse than the disease.
By Sami Reiss

August 8, 2023
Whats Behind the Rise of the Sunscreen Truther
Michael Houtz / Getty Images
Earlier this summer a new meme, about what girls in relationships should be doing to make their boyfriends healthier, circulated online. The broad thrust fit in with the trad health protocol that often comes with seed oil avoidance: Get their men off of AirPods and fluoride, get them on magnesium, and throw away their sunscreen. By the standards of the esoteric health space, the post wasn’t super remarkable. But then it got reposted by “Dewy Dudes," a podcast for downtown men who have skin care routines, and questions began to pop up. Namely, what’s wrong with SPF?

That people are going without sunscreen in the name of health seems, on first blush, very odd. It’s hotter than ever outside, and the standard advice from mainstream skin experts is often daily SPF use, not just on beach trips. Seeking out UV exposure seems, like cigarettes and littering, to be a vice we left behind decades ago. But if you dig deep enough online, or listen to enough podcasts—of both the downtown and scientific variety—you’ll notice people avoiding sun protection outright. On “Red Scare,” the idea of skipping sunscreen is already a couple of summers old. Andrew Huberman, the neurologist and podcaster, who is not himself a sunscreen truther, nevertheless called it a “third rail” of the health world on Joe Rogan’s podcast. (Huberman recently teased an episode of his own that will deal with these questions.)

Sunscreens generally work in two ways. Mineral sunscreens, like those with zinc, block the sun’s rays like a shield, and scatter them before they get under your skin. So-called chemical sunscreens go into the skin and absorb the UV rays themselves. (Both are chemically derived.) “When deciding between mineral and chemical sunscreens,” says Dr. Jenna Lester, a dermatologist at UCSF Health, “the best one is the one you’re going to use.” Strength and application recommendations vary, but the Skin Cancer Foundation’s website advises people to use sunscreen with a minimum SPF 15 rating, and apply it every two hours. This is about the baseline suggestion; Lester says for UV protection, 30 is “ideal.”

Parsing this advice can get complicated, and applying it can be frustrating. “Sunscreen is one of the trickiest products for people to find their match,” says Colleen Kelsey, a writer based in New York who has worked in the beauty industry. “There’s a lot of negative user experience. Ingredients in sunscreens can break people out, blending [with makeup] is an issue.”

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Finding a good sunscreen in the United States can be especially difficult. Ben Friedlander, a music marketer based in Los Angeles, includes sunscreen in his daily Dewy Dudes-adjacent skin care routine, but has found what’s in stores here severely lacking. “I don’t really use American sunscreens anymore,” he says. After going down a Reddit hole during the pandemic, he switched over to a facial sunscreen from a Spanish brand that he says works better than anything he could find locally. These sorts of superior sunscreens aren’t easily available to buy in America for regulatory reasons. The FDA classifies sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug, so there’s a long approval process for newer chemicals, like the kinds found in the European, Japanese, and Korean sunscreens that blend in better with makeup or into beards.

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In spite of that regulatory process, the domestic sunscreen market can feel like a minefield. Chemical sunscreens are known to absorb into our blood. (Whether that's concerning depends on how comforting you find the fact that lots of cosmetics have similar properties.) A couple of popular brands were taken off shelves a few years ago for including benzene—which is decidedly not what anyone wants from an over-the-counter health product. A 2020 study of some common ingredients—avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene and ecamsule—in these sunscreens found they exceed the safety threshold for these chemicals set by the FDA. When combined with other factors—whether a sunscreen is reef safe; whether it contains endocrine disruptors—it is difficult, at best, to know what to buy. It’s not hard to see how someone who’s already ditching soy, fragrances, and seed oils might go one step further and do away with sunscreen altogether.

The straight and narrow approach to all of this is to be aware of sunscreen’s limitations and act accordingly—Lester suggests that sunscreen be applied as part of a broader approach to “sun protection,” which should include “seeking shade, wearing sun protective clothing, avoiding the sun during the peak hours, 10:00 to 4:00, and wearing wide brimmed hats.” Relying on sunscreen alone, she says, “isn’t as effective as layering different aspects of this sun-protective approach.”

But the sunscreen skeptics tend to be opposed to sun protection in general, emphasizing the known benefits of time in the sun, citing studies that show show sun exposure improves nitric oxide production, which has been shown to lower blood pressure. Other studies suggest that avoiding the sun outright leads to higher risk factors of all-cause mortality. Still others have shown spending time in the sun leads to better sleep and potentially more testosterone.

But not using any sun protection at all, it’s safe to say, is not what doctors recommend. The truther position is both hand-wavy and over-confident. “We don’t know the time course on skin cancer and exposure,” says Dr. Lester: exposure now might lead to melanoma or skin cancer down the line. Beyond that, the vibrant health markers that these meme accounts are threading out to their followers are moving goalposts. (Still burning or peeling? You just aren’t there yet.) And with so much of the sunscreen-skeptical discourse coming from social accounts that exist to sell things to their followers—Patreon podcast episodes, liver pills—there’s room for some doubt.

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Still, there may be something interesting here. It stands to reason that it’s a good thing to spend time outside, in much the same way that eating nutrient-dense food that doesn’t come out of a box may have a more holistic suite of benefits than we can understand. Sun protection itself is not a static discussion in dermatology—recent research on rising rates of melanoma as an “epidemic of diagnosis” has raised questions about the relationship between the disease and its mortality rates.

But the sunscreen truthers are interesting not because of the specifics of their critique—they’re a symptom of a larger problem. As with our food system, where the dominant network's real failings create room for shaky advice to spread, sunscreen consumers are working too hard. It’s not hard to understand why there’s doubt about whether it’s good for you and the environment. This is why the memes are out there.

But there could be a more neutral middle ground: “If you’re faced with the option of only using American brands and putting goopy white sunscreen on your face as a daily option,” says Friedlander, “I would probably opt to wear a hat.”