Dr. Mitchell Elliott Bender

Yeah.

Well, let me give you what I think is a practical approach to sunscreen because the consumer can be very confused by all this.

And I'll try and just give you some basic, basic premises here.

And there are basically two kinds of sunscreen.

One is called physical sunscreen.

That usually has chemicals called titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.

And these are sunscreens that act like they reflect light, just the same way window glass reflects raindrops.

The light hits the skin, it bounces off, it doesn't penetrate into the skin and cause damage.

And then the other kind of sunscreen is called chemical sunscreens.

And these have a number of chemicals,

oxybenzone, avobenzone, octocrylene, and others.

The names are really not important.

But what these sunscreens do is they absorb the light, like a sponge on your countertop that soaks up water.

The story about chemical sunscreens, there's some controversy going on that, number one, people have found that some of these chemicals can get absorbed through the skin into the bloodstream.

No one has demonstrated any harm, but people are concerned about that.

And then the other thing about the chemical sunscreens in laboratory experiments, they took fish tanks with coral and they dumped in a lot of these chemicals and the coral did not do well.

And there's a question of whether these sunscreens actually cause physical harm to coral reefs.

It's very controversial because no one really knows whether these laboratory experiments have any practical value in the real world.

But if you go to a place like Hawaii, the chemical sunscreens are banned.

You're not legally allowed to use these chemical sunscreens on the beach because they're worried about damage to the ocean and coral, although it's not proven that that would happen.