In the digital age, both content creators and companies misinform consumers on how to care for their skin.
With the increase of content creators on YouTube and other wannabe skin care experts online, finding reliable skin care information is as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack.
Clean beauty is often not clean.
“The messaging behind clean beauty products isn’t regulated either, a brand can claim anything it wants about its supposedly clean/green/sustainable products,” said Lauren Balsamo, Cosmopolitan’s deputy beauty director in a May 24, 2021 article.
Despite the fact that clean beauty is expected to be free of harmful chemicals within a certain formula, there is no definition of “clean” when it comes to cosmetics and it has primarily become a term used in marketing, according to an Aug. 26 Buzzfeed article.”
For the public, it's especially important to pay attention to those claims.
According to the Skin Cancer Foundation website, regular use of sunscreen can reduce your chance of melanoma by 50%. Skin Cancer Foundation is an organization that says it provides medically reviewed information regarding skin according to its website
Dealing with misinformation becomes increasingly important in regards to chemicals put in sunscreens.
Sunscreen has proven to be a frequent victim of misinformation, specifically between chemical-based sunscreens and physical sunscreens.
According to a March 21, 2021 Healthline article, chemical sunscreens work by absorbing UV rays, physical sunscreens block UV rays.
This has been explained again and again by content creators.
However, viewers must watch out for who’s really telling the truth and who could be spreading misinformation.
One content creator on YouTube who is qualified is Dr. Shereen Idriss. With more than 300,000 subscribers, Idriss takes time to talk through beauty and skin care routines on her channel.
In her March 2021 YouTube video, she explains common myths perpetuated by sunscreen brands and their own marketing ploys.
Different SPF levels in sunscreens can be deceiving, Idriss said during the video.
“More than SPF 50. Once you reach around SPF 100, it’s a false sense of security,” Idriss said.
SPF is a measure of how long it takes for protected skin to become burned compared to unprotected skin, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) SPF webpage.
But, the FDA said SPF does not relate to the amount of time spent in the sun. Rather, SPF relates to how much ultraviolet light is exposed to the skin. On top of misconstruing the truths of SPF, some sunscreen companies use misleading terminology.
“Reef-friendly doesn’t mean anything, in the sense that it is not a regulatory term by the FDA,” Idriss said.
“Reef-friendly” or “Reef-safe” are terms typically used to identify sunscreens that do not contain oxybenzone and octinoxate, which are two common UV-blocking chemicals that some studies have shown to have detrimental effects on reefs.
Dr. Jennifer Lin, an assistant professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School, told Harvard Health Publishing in a Feb. 15, 2021 article that the sunscreen ingredient oxybenzone gets bad press because of a study on rats that found it may interrupt hormones. Lin explained it would take someone 277 years to get the same dose as used on the rats.
Influencers tend to dictate which products consumers use. We can all be susceptible to a 26-year-old influencer with perfect skin telling us what products they use.
Some creators are qualified dermatologists, while others are not only living a lie as wannabe-skin-product influencers, but are also doing a disservice to every single one of their followers.
The average person would be none the wiser, as content creator credentials can be masked simply by your computer screen.
Unless someone proves on camera that they are qualified, why are you listening?
That is the question skin-care fanatics must ask themselves before blindly purchasing.
