UV Geekery part 1...
...the UV safety report, the adverts that show why it's necessary, robots in dermatology, plus some of my top sunscreens for daily use...
Apologies to those of you hoping to read Pia Long’s affordable fragrance recommendations this week, I’ve shifted that back because I’m devoting the whole of this newsletter to UV and all things sun. I kind of couldn’t not — and not just because the UK is about to be hit by a heatwave. In fact this one got soooo long that I had to split it into two. So this week, you’ve got a bit on the UV Safety inquiry report, a bit on AI being used to detect skin cancer, a bit on WTF ads, and part one of my current daily sunscreen favourites. Next week you’ll get part two of my sun screen favourites, along with some really interesting sunscreen and influencer research from Australia and some inside intel on UVA. Let’s get involved…
BTW: some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links which means if you buy a product through them, I can earn a small amount of commission. This will never influence my opinion on something: I only rave about products I really rate. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone (and, for more on my thoughts on affiliate links, click here.)
That UV Report
For those of you who haven’t seen me banging on about it on notes / Instagram / LinkedIn, last week saw the launch of a year-long project: A preventable crisis: The case for a national UV strategy. The report was the result of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Beauty & Wellbeing’s inquiry into UV safety. The inquiry involved seven in-person evidence-giving sessions and countless written testimonies from individuals involved in all aspects of UV safety — from dermatologists, skin cancer charities, individuals with lived experience of skin cancer, academics, sunbed salon owners and many more. The report draws together what they had to say and looks at the current landscape around UV, at what the problems are, at what’s worked in other countries when it comes to UV safety, at what’s worked in the UK to improve public health in other areas, and makes 29 separate recommendations to government, industry and individuals about what needs to be done to improve UV safety in the UK. And I wrote it.
I was feeling very British about it and nearly deleted that last sentence. But it really is one of the pieces of work that I’m most proud of. I obviously didn’t do it single-handedly. I had huge support from the British Beauty Council — the secretariat of the APPG — and particular from their Chief Policy Officer, Victoria Brownlie when I was in my “shit I’ve never written anything for government before” and “gahhhhhh this is massive how on earth do we work out what our recommendations should be?” episodes. And it could never have happened without Carolyn Harris MP, who heads the APPG, is a total force of nature and is backed by a similarly brilliant team.
Then there are all the people who gave their time and expertise to the enquiry. And they are part of why I’m so proud of it. Because I wrote the report and was pretty happy with it, but it wasn’t until I walked into the room on the morning of the launch when I had a “shit, all those people who gave evidence will be there and I really hope I’ve done them justice” moment. I know there’s one group of people who doesn’t think I have (The Sunbed Association and various salon owners and sunbed manufacturers) but everyone else seems pretty happy.
So far so yay, but the thing is, the wheels of politics turn really, really slowly. And if I think about it too much, I get depressed about the idea that even if any of these recommendations do change anything, it’s going to take a load of campaigning and aaaaaaaages. But I have to remember that change might not happen tomorrow, or next week, next month or even next year (yeah, launching it at a time when members of his party are trying to oust the prime minister was sub-optimal but what can you do?) but what this report has done is create a starting point, or a foundation, that I hope can be built on in the future and, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon (well at some point) things will change.
If you want to read the report — or even just the 29 recommendations (skip to page 50) — it’s here. But I thought I’d pull out some of the things that have either grabbed the headlines, been a topic of conversation, or interested me along the way… (it should be flagged that while many of the recommendations do chime with my personal perspectives, every single one of them is evidence-based and I worked really hard to try to ensure that that comes across in the way I wrote, structured and referenced the report.)
The Sunbed Association were “extremely disappointed” in the report — you can read their full response here — and specifically with comparisons with tobacco regulation and proposals around advertising restrictions. The report suggested that, in the same way that advertising of tobacco products was banned 16 years after it was classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, so too should the advertising of sunbeds (classified as a Group 1 carcinogen in 2009) be banned.
Now I’m not sure if you’ve seen the advertising and promotion around sunbeds at the moment but it is wild. Earlier this year the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) flagged some examples of ads that they’d banned. They included adverts that made claims that sunbeds:
were safe and healthy
could improve brain function
could boost vitamin D levels
could improve mood, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and psoriasis.
As I’ve whinged before, I think the ASA don’t have as much teeth as they ought to so while this is a slap on the wrists, I don’t think it’s a serious deterrent so ditching sunbed advertising and marketing all together doesn’t seem like a terrible route to go down — especially when there’s good evidence that doing the same with cigarettes had a significant effect.
Some people have asked about the recommendations around VAT on sun protection. People like Jessica Zbinden-Webster (she had skin cancer in her 20s, was told it was the result of childhood sun exposure, and went on to found the #AxeTheTax campaign) have been lobbying for years for the 20% VAT to be removed entirely from sun protection, arguing that it is treated as a luxury cosmetic rather than an essential health product but the recommendation that the report made was for VAT to be removed entirely from dedicated SPF30+ sun protection products designed for children, and reduced to 5% on dedicated SPF30+ sun protection products.
This might sound like a bit of an arbitrary distinction but throughout, the aim was to look at precedents. Currently in the UK, essential items for children, such as clothing and footwear, are already zero-rated and there’s a concessionary rate of 5% on other items considered to be socially or medically important – such as smoking cessation aids, contraception and children’s car seats.It was felt that using these sorts of precedents — along with financial arguments about how what the Treasury stood to lose in VAT it would gain from reduced spend on cancer treatment within the NHS — was the most likely way to get these proposals considered by Government.
Me with Jessica Zbinden-Webster. While working on the inquiry there were some things that I was made aware of that I just had known nothing about before. It seems so obvious now but I’d just never considered that sun protection wasn’t a compulsory part of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for outdoor workers. Hearing Shane McCormick, a former landscape gardener who has had skin cancer several times talk about his experiences was really sobering. Outdoor workers face a 60% higher risk of non-melanoma skin cancer compared to indoor workers, and one in three non-melanoma skin cancer deaths worldwide is associated with working outdoors in the sun. When you read things like that you’re like well of course the sun should be considered an occupational hazard, of course employers should be mandated to provide sun protection to outdoor workers and to ensure it’s used properly.
I could wang on a lot more about what was in the report but there’s so much else to squeeze into this newsletter. One of the aspects that I’m choosing to see as a beacon of hope is that throughout the inquiry we encountered so many individuals, retailers and brands who really want to help in this space. They’re already spending a tonne of cash on individual efforts to educate young people for example, or promote the importance of adequate sun protection. If we could pull them all together, pool their resources and create a cohesive campaign with a single message, it could be amazing… but that’s a future project that I’m hoping I’ll get the chance to work on with the British Beauty Council…
The robot will check your mole now…
One of the examples of brands getting involved in this space that I went to last week involved La Roche-Posay. They’re partnering with Chelsea & Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to sponsor (to the tune of £250k) the Trust’s work with teledermatology and at the event we heard about the DERM (Deep Ensemble for Recognition of Malignancy, if you wanted to know) AI tool, developed by Skin Analytics, that has been being used to help speed up skin cancer diagnosis and treatment since 2022.
It means that if your GP is worried about a dodgy mole, you can fill in an online questionnaire, go to a special photography hub and have your mole snapped, DERM will assess whether it’s benign or needs further investigation and you’ll either be discharged or passed onto a human being. Chelsea & Westminster started a research study in 2020, then in 2022 started using DERM alongside dermatologists, and since 2024, it’s been working autonomously — and quite brilliantly. In the last 12 months it’s seen around 6,000 patients and discharged 30% of them without a dermatologist needing to be involved.
According to Dr Lucy Thomas, one of the derms working with the technology, the amount of time that frees up is incredible. “Those who did need to be seen could be reviewed remotely, meaning fewer in-person appointments, increasing clinician capacity by 63%” Given what I was talking about last week about the scarcity of dermatologists in the UK, this is really important stuff.
I can see how some people might be a bit squeamish about this sort of thing and worry about its limitations (yes it has been tested on all skin types, including the darkest ones where skin cancers can be harder to identify — 17,000 darker skinned patients have been assessed by the technology and it picked up 100% of their cancers). But this feels like AI being used for good. AI will never be able to be the human face that you want to talk to when you’ve got skin cancer, but if it can dispatch you quicker if you haven’t, and reduce the time when you don’t know whether you have or you haven’t, I feel like that can only be a good thing.
My hard line on tan lines
Literally as I was on my way to the launch of the UV Safety report, on the Tube I spotted this ad…
… yes I know it’s meant to be a play on tube lines, but it’s also marketing tanning. Sorry, maybe I lost my sense of humour spending too much time talking to people about skin cancer and how, in around nine in ten cases, it’s entirely avoidable. Because the tan line trend has been around a while now — Cosmopolitan and Dazed wrote about it in 2024 — and it’s this weird and fucked up glamourisation of showing how tanned (I really feel like I should start saying “how damaged”) your skin is by showing the contrast between tanned / damaged skin and skin that’s been protected from the sun in some way. It’s dangerous and massively irresponsible, but it seems to have become a part of advertising culture.
Because when I mentioned the tube ad I’d seen to Jessica Zbinden-Webster, she sent me this, which the creative agency behind Victoria Beckham’s Portofino fragrance had proudly posted earlier this year…
…and that put me in mind of this, which I saw last summer on MCo Beauty’s Instagram
Is it just me? It’s not just me is it? Please tell me it’s not just me. I just feel that it’s one thing when you’ve got dumbass teens on TikTok doing this shit, but where are the adults in the room when these sort of things are being conceptualised as adverts? Where are the people saying “we know stupid kids are doing this but it’s literally killing them so how about maybe we don’t promote this sort of stupidity and glamourise it?”
Lord, I grow weary of this world sometimes.
My (current) sunscreen top ten
A few things before we get into the weeds — I wear broad spectrum SPF 50 on my face every single day of the year. If I do nothing else, I do that. (Which might be part of the reason that I favour hydrating formulas as they’re often my moisturiser too.) Honestly, I do it mostly out of vanity, rather than fear of skin cancer. Do I think that in England, in the depths of winter, on a day when the UV index is 1, I really need broad spectrum SPF 50? Probably not, no, but I do believe in the power of habit, and if that means I wear sunscreen when I don’t actually need it, I’m OK with that. Because I don’t believe sunscreen is toxic. I also have no preference for chemical or mineral filters and don’t tend to obsessively check— I think a lot of my favourites are probably largely chemical and, as a result should be suitable for all skintones, but the best person to check in with if you have darker skin is Julian Sass (Fitzpatrick V/VI) and his sunscreen database.
I’ve talked before on how I use sunscreen now — if I’m not going out I try to be liberal with an every day one, if I’m going out, usually an every day one followed by a tinted one — and about how I feel like sunscreen formulation has improved so much in recent years that, to be honest, it’s so much easier than it was to find one that you like and use. I don’t care what you use, just use something. Here are some of the ones I’ve been using and enjoying recently…
The every day ones
I constantly talk about Altruist Sun (£10.50 for 2 x 100ml tubes) — it’s a great, dermatologist-founded brand, that exists to make good, cosmetically-elegant sunscreen available to all — and it gives products and money to children with albinism in Africa. Honestly, there’s nothing not to love.
La Roche-Posay Anthelios Anti-Dark Spot Fluid (£16.50) — the original LRP fluid has been a long time favourite of mine in its many iterations, which included a tinted one, but I like this because it contains Melasyl, the L’Oréal Groupe’s patented anti-pigmentation molecule. Honestly melasma is a constant battle so every little helps.
Australian brand, Ultra Violette, had a rough old ride last year around testing of their products showing SPFs lower than stated and I felt really sorry for them because Ava and Bec are among the people in the industry with the most dedication to what they do and I swear every other suncare brand out there was thinking “there but for the grace of God…” What that whole episode did show up was a massive issue with the testing process that Janna Mandell dived into in real detail here — I loved this feature, if you’re interested in learning more. I’m a big fan of their products and while I don’t usually hero miniatures (ecological reasons), I’ll make an exception for these pocket sized versions of their sunscreens — I adore the hydrating Supreme Screen — and the Mini Mate (£15) will be in my bag all year so I’ll never be caught out.
Unless you’re a French pharmacy brand obsessive you might not have come across SVR but they’re another of those in the Bioderma mould that — like Mixa — are starting to gain traction over here. Their Blur Sun Secure SPF 50 (£16.80) has a really interesting and unusual texture for a French skincare brand — I’d usually expect them to be a lot more traditional but this mousse-in-a-tube has an almost bouncy, spongy feel to it and dries down almost powdery with a blurring effect that’s subtle but still there. Plus it has a nostalgic “sun cream” fragrance that I adore.
There has to be a Korean one in there and, like everyone else, I do really like the super lightweight Beauty of Joseon Relief Sun + Rice + Probiotics SPF 50 (£12.40) for its barely there feel. And I am so grateful to Korean sunscreen because I feel it’s really forced everyone to raise their game. New sunscreens from CeraVe (£14.32) and Clinique (£24) have both impressed me in a way that I don’t think they would have done before Korean formulations started to dominate the market.
Next week, I’ll cover the tinted SPFs I’m currently very much enjoying and two that slightly break the bank, but that I think are really worth it.
Despite splitting this in two that was still looooong, ah well, if you’re in the UK then you’ll have large parts of a sunny bank holiday to peruse it over. And more UV geekery incoming next week.
Until next time…
Yet again your work is so important, thank you so much. I feel like every week I want to throw a parade in your honour but perhaps that’s wandering into “weird territory”! All this is to say I just love everything you write, and with such heart. ❤️
Wowowow what a great, great piece of writing, and so incredibly fantastic that you wrote that report too. Sorry for the superlatives. Just v impressed