It’s July! The season of hot and sunny weather (not in UK tho), the dresses and shorts time, juicy strawberry fields, and beautiful beach views. July is definitely my favourite month of the year, however, I might be slightly biased as it is also my birthday month. I decided to spend the whole of my day doing things I love. I had an osteopathy session in the morning, then fancy breakfast later followed by a full body massage. We then had an amazing dinner with my fiance and finished our evening at the cinema sneaking in our pre-bought snacks. I still don’t know if that’s supposed to be illegal?

Despite us living on a rainy island, the weather does spoil us occasionally. The rarity of this allows everyone to appreciate the sunny and warm days more and although everyone starts whining about the heat being too unbearable very quickly, we still end up being on the beach soaking it all in.

Now this leads me to the subject I wanted to talk about in today’s blog and that is sunscreen. I am not going to talk about how important the sunscreen is as everyone knows this (unless you still cover yourself with the glowy-shimmery oils and then bake yourself crisp- you need to reconsider what you know about your skin, sun and body). What I want to go through today are the ingredients in your sunscreens. I had a sun tanning session with my friend a couple of weeks ago and as it was a last minute decision, I remembered that I do not have a good suncreen at home. So I popped in Tesco and discovered that they have a few choices with unusually cheap brands in there. Being short of time I took one, didn’t think of looking at the ingredients at the time, put it on the areas I want to protect the most and had a lush time. Later in the day, the fact that only the areas I covered with sunscreen were red wasn’t the saddest part- the ingredient list I read through was:

Oxybenzone

Octinoxate

Avobenzone

Titanium dioxide

and all the other ingredients that are quite hard to pronounce and it’s not because English is not my first language. All of the ingredients listed have general safety concerns especially due to being highly absorptive. They can not only cause hormone disruption (altering oestrogen in women, testosterone in men) and skin allergies but are also toxic to oceans and wildlife. All of them are supposed to be safe in small amounts, however, sunscreen users have been found to have higher concentrations of the named chemicals than safe amounts.

So what shall we do? The answer is quite easy, to be honest. Read the ingredients, do your research. The hot and sunny days are so rare in UK that you don’t have to worry about constantly spending big amounts of money on more expensive sunscreens. A few bottles a season should be enough. Companies like Jason, babo botanicals, Green people, Ren and others are giving people choices of non-toxic sunscreens and have a variety of price tags as well.

And whilst we are still waiting for the sun and warmth on our skin, we are still here to help your body to thrive and function at its best.