If you’ve ever had the misfortune of trying to find sensible skincare advice on TikTok, you may have stumbled across a trend in which influencers encourage their followers to skip sunscreen. The spurious grounds for their strike on SPF vary but often centre around the idea that vitamin D can only be generated via unprotected skin, that our forefathers didn’t have sunscreens so surely we don’t actually need it, and that the chemicals are purportedly dangerous.
I’ll quickly debunk all three. First, no sunscreen is 100 per cent effective so you’ll still generate some vitamin D, and taking supplements is much better than accruing sun damage. Remember too that in the UK the sun is only strong enough to prompt your body to produce vitamin D between April and September so you will need some other plan to get enough of it (I supplement year round).
