SPF is your friend. Repeat after me. SPF is my friend. We all spend countless hours of our summers lathering and then every two hours after that, re-lathering, sunscreen SPF 100+ on our children. I know I do and I am pretty sure, so do you. Right?
What I don’t do is lather sunscreen SPF 100+ on myself. I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s when tanning was pretty much a right of passage. I did in fact, worship the sun gods and on occasion even the tanning bed ones, too. I was such a hardcore tanaholic that I distinctly remember tanning in a diesel fuel/baby oil concoction that my friend’s mother told us would make us darker.
In retrospect, I suspect she may have been trying to kill us. Anytime someone suggests that you lay out in the sun in a flammable solution, you should probably re-think that relationship.
And I definitely remember looking at my wedding photos thinking that someone really should have told me to stop tanning like it was 1999. Well, all’s fair in love and war, especially when you think the new millennium is the end of the world. That crazy tanaholic mom has nothing on me. She may look like tanned leather but I looked like black leather, dipped in diesel oil and burnt to a crisp on the rooftop.
Now, years later, I use tinted moisturizer with SPF 30. I use Hawaiian Tropic with an SPF of 4. I know, it’s practically nothing but it’s slightly better than nothing. I am trying. But who knew that we needed SPF in our lipstick? Did you know?
Well, we do. It seems over the past five years there has been a significant increase of women who have skin cancer on their lips. That scares me a lot.
I wear lip-gloss mostly. Guess what? That’s even worse. It attracts the sun and it’s damaging rays. It’s pretty much the same as laying on a rooftop coated in diesel fuel and baby oil (because apparently baby oil is not attractive enough to the sun; we need to kick it up a notch by poisoning ourselves.)
To be safe, look for lipsticks with SPF 15+ and if you must wear lip-gloss, layer it over the top of your opaque SPF infused lipstick. If you really want that just gloss look, use it over a nude lipstick. Don’t forget to reapply your lipstick every 2 hours (just like your sunscreen), especially if you are frolicking in the beach.
The moral of the story is that you are just as important to your kids as they are to you. They need a mom around to take care of them so when you are slathering them from head to toe with sunscreen with an SPF of “to infinity and beyondâ€Â, make sure to slather yourself, as well. Don’t forget the lips. You can’t kiss tiny heads goodnight if your lips are burned, or worse, you have skin cancer on your lips that have to be removed.
Do you wear SPF lipstick or, like me, did you never think of protecting your lips?
Photo source: SocialSpice.de
