Do you ever get that feeling that you just want to gobble up your sunscreen?
Nah, me, either.
But there can be consequences if you ever do eat it on a whim, or maybe just accidentally, CosmeticsDesign says. The zinc oxide particles contained in an average bottle of sunscreen (the same bottle that has saved you from approximately fifty sunburns this summer), can be potentially lethal if ingested.
So be careful, especially around curious (and hungry) children. In the unlikely event that you decide to feast on your sunscreen, think twice.
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Potential problems of zinc oxide made me sit up and take notice. We probably don’t eat too much of the sunscreen on our bodies, but I have seen zinc oxide in sunscreens for the lips. I will read the labels of lip care products more carefully.
This thought has never crossed my mind but definitely agree with Deborah about reading labels on lip care products.
What concerns me is that we absorb those chemicals through our skin, which isn’t much different than eating them. How safe are they really? Recently studies have been showing that the active ingredients in some suncreens may be dangerous, and doctors are speculatingt that they actually CAUSE cancer.
thank you Rebecca! why rub lethal chemicals on your/your baby’s skin? WHY are there lethal chemicals in anything we use?????
Anything is toxic in sufficient quantity. Zinc is a case in point, it is an essential part of our diet and you would die without it. But large quantities are harmful. It doesn’t surprise me that a smaller particle is more toxic than a larger one for something like zinc oxide – after all it has a larger surface area.
But I am a bit surprised that even a whole bottle of sunscreen would contain enough zinc oxide to do any harm on a one off basis, even to a child.
Has anyone got hold of the original paper and checked their calculations?
Rebecca I have some good news for you- very little of what is applied to skin is absorbed. No doctor I know is speculating about sunscreens causing cancer. The last doctor I spoke to about sunscreens and cancer said that they prevented skin cancer. That is certainly what the scientific literature suggests. I am now a bit worried about infants ingesting zinc, so it is nice to be able to put your mind at rest on cancer.
I think it’s the combination of all of the chemicals found in our daily products that make me uncomfortable. The more labels I read the more concerned I get. Most of these are said not to be harmful when used in moderation however, when combining somewhere between 5 and 10 of these products before we even go to work in the morning, it’s a recipe for disaster.
There have actually been some studies done relating to Vitamin A containing cosmetics (including most sunscreens) and sun exposure. Wearing Vitamin A topically while being in the sun has been theoretically linked to cause skin cancer. I haven’t been able to find any concrete evidence on either side of this theory on the Internet.. Only rumors and lab statistics for experiments done on mice (which I can’t seem to find the article on now! Lol).