TikTok Customers Are Contouring Their Faces With Solar Harm—Whoops, I Meant “Sunscreen”

“Sufferers are placing their pores and skin at risk once they select to reveal [it] to the solar with no sunscreen safety. If you find yourself contouring with sunscreen, you’re exposing your pores and skin to radiation,” says Jeannette Graf, MD, a board-certified dermatologist and assistant medical professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai College of Medication in New York Metropolis.

There may be additionally a standard false impression that tanned pores and skin helps to stop sunburns and, due to this fact, can even stop the opposite damaging results of the solar. That is one other fantasy dermatologists can simply debunk: “It’s the easy fact that no tan is secure in your pores and skin. Any tan means your DNA has been harmed,” says Sheilagh Maguiness, MD, a board-certified dermatologist. “The areas that tan have been broken and will probably be extra susceptible to photoaging and pores and skin cancers in the long term.”

Sure, some SPF contour advocates apply a base layer of SPF 30 throughout their whole face and, technically, this does meet the minimal SPF advice by dermatologists. So if an SPF 30 sunscreen is used on the entire face may dermatologists lend their approval to this pattern? In brief: Most dermatologists would nonetheless be towards it.

“Utilizing a decrease SPF on the complete face is actually higher than nothing,” Dr. Maguiness says. “Nonetheless, in case you are deliberately getting a tan by utilizing a low SPF sunscreen, you’ll nonetheless find yourself with photodamage” and that finally can result in wrinkles, solar spots, and even pores and skin most cancers. An extra drawback with this pattern is that reapplying sunscreen to take care of the contour all through the day is not precisely user-friendly.

“Sunscreen ought to be reapplied each two hours whereas uncovered [to the sun] or extra incessantly if sweating or swimming,” Dr. Maguiness provides. “I feel that making an attempt to reapply the sunscreen in these particular contouring areas would possibly deter folks from doing the reapplication, once more resulting in elevated dangers for sunburn.”

However does SPF contouring work?

If the hazards of the solar aren’t sufficient to dissuade you from making an attempt this pattern, maybe some perception from make-up artist Hillary Clark is. “The probability of reaching a contoured impact and ‘snatched’ look is zero to none,” she says. “You possibly can’t management the way in which that the solar will hit your face, as a consequence of reflections off of sand, pavement, buildings, and water. And a few areas are extra susceptible to creating melanin than others, so reaching the specified contour impact is inconceivable.”