Can Sunscreen Give You Wrinkles?

Ellie and Dan are concerned: Is it true that sunscreens like avobenzone and titanium dioxide can cause your skin to age? The Right Brain sheds some light on sunscreens:

There is some cause for concern…

A review of the technical literature reveals several studies that have evaluated the damaging effects of sunscreens. For example, this report in Pubmed indicates that Titanium Dioxide can cause damage to nucleic acids, such as DNA. And while we couldn’t find any specific references to avobenzone, we did see other reports linking sunscreen actives to free radical induced DNA damage.

But don’t jump to conclusions…

But these studies were done in vitro (that’s Latin for “in the laboratory”) so they are only indicators of what could happen on your skin. For these effects to occur, the sunscreens have to penetrate into the nucleus of your cells. There’s no data that we could find that shows that a) sunscreens get into the nucleus and b) that they react the same way on people or animals as they do in the lab.

More research is needed…

Still, this is valuable information because it tells us what effects to watch for. Science News Online put it best when they said: “The results may not reveal what sunscreens actually do on the skin, but they do indicate what sunscreens are capable of doing — “so that if you want to examine what these chemicals might do in a realistic situation, then at least you know what to look for.”

The Beauty Brains Bottom Line:

Researchers should continue to look into the mechanism of how these ingredients interact with skin to ensure they’re safe for our use. But we need to be careful to not jump to conclusions about a potential danger when the proven danger of skin cancer faces us every day. Dermatologists still consider sunscreens an effective tool against this potentially deadly disease.