For the Love of God, Wear Sunscreen!

Do not make us smack you with a flip flop

I couldn’t find a rights-free image with the search terms “person holding sunscreen looking at you like WTF put this the fuck on” so I made my own.

We love The Youths. They are young and smart and thoughtful and funny and spry and caring and full of collagen, for us to harvest for our patent-pending youth serum, UM, I MEAN, they are energetic and inspiring! And because we love them, we worry. We worry about their health, especially when we are successfully emotionally manipulated by news stories, like this one from the New York Times!

In an online survey of more than 1,000 people published this month by the American Academy of Dermatology, 28 percent of 18- to 26-year-olds said they didn’t believe suntans caused skin cancer. And 37 percent said they wore sunscreen only when others nagged them about it.

In another poll, published this month by Orlando Health Cancer Institute, 14 percent of adults under 35 believed the myth that wearing sunscreen every day is more harmful than direct sun exposure. While the surveys are too small to capture the behaviors of all young adults, doctors said they’ve noticed these knowledge gaps and riskier behaviors anecdotally among their younger patients, too.

A doctor adds the caveat that this isn’t so much a Gen Z thing as a young folks bein’ young thing. For example, research done between 1986 and 1996 “found that then-18- to 24-year-olds (who are now middle-aged) were more likely than older adults to visit tanning booths and get sunburns.”

I well remember my own tendency to rebel against my SPF-obsessed, very pale, very red-haired father by attempting to tan like persons gifted with more melanin than myself. Rebellion comes in many forms, apparently including inducing oneself to get pale white person diarrhea fever shakes and chills due to a bad sunburn.

What’s different for this generation, though, is that TikTok, Instagram, and even that old dinosaur YouTube are chock-full of pseudo-organic, faux-expert back-to-earth types and conspiracy theorists who claim that all sunscreen is actually worse for your human skin than the UV rays from the sun. LOLOLOL but some people believe this!

Babies, noooo! Do not fry like bacon and/or textured vegetable protein processed in a laboratory in order to simulate the texture and taste of the flesh of the common hog! Do not get the skin cancers (there are a few)! And if you think only pale people get it, think again: Skin cancer can occur in people of any skin color or tone, even on places like the scalp, ears, toes, or nail beds. Doctors often aren’t trained to evaluate patients of color for skin cancer, which can lead to higher rates of mortality when these patients are diagnosed later.

Also, if you, like me, are of Middle Age or Elder Years, please do not say, “Well, I’ve done lots of damage already, a little more won’t hurt” or “Who cares? We all die sometime!” and throw caution to the wind. Do an extreme sport instead!

Take it from somebody who got skin cancer when she was 18 years old. (!) I say “got skin cancer” as if it only began to develop when I was 18, but that’s likely not true. What probably happened was that I got one or more bad burns in my early to middle teens, and a basal cell carcinoma began growing slowly.

Basal cell carcinoma is rarely fatal, and hardly ever metastasizes. Still, left untreated for too long, here’s what basal cell carcinoma can do:

• Grow deep, injuring nerves and blood vessels!

• Harm your muscles!

• Reach into your freaking bones!

• If it’s on your face, IT CAN GROW INTO YOUR BRAIN!

• Cause doctors to say, “Hi, we need to remove a part of your ear or nose or lip or other body part!”

Not fun, right? No! I was lucky, in that my pediatrician actually did a skin check and recommended I see a specialist even though there was a teensy tiny likelihood of me actually having a skin cancer that (according to the Skin Cancer Foundation) mostly affects pale dudes over the age of 50.

I just got stared at by a bunch of awkward medical students while my entire body was photographed with, basically, high-resolution Polaroids (ah, 1999!) after which point a surgeon took a chunk of skin out of my back and stitched me up.

It could’ve been worse, but again, I was lucky.

If you’re shopping for an image-conscious person born after 1997 who is obsessed with skincare yet somehow lacks interest in sunscreen (my friend’s kid is 12 and wants to do a 10-step skincare routine because capitalism and peer pressure have infected her brain via TikTok), buy them some overpriced organic reef-safe SPF and tell them it’ll make Olivia Rodrigo or Nicholas Galitzine or Sabrina Carpenter or Chappell Roan or Shaboozey or Blackpink love them (you do not need to know who these talented people are, just say these words at a youth).

Or claim that wearing SPF will somehow provide a living wage for everyone in their age group, or that it will turn a $60,000-a-year college fee into $60 a year. Or suggest that big floppy sun hats are chic, or that they can wear that very wild white heavy mineral sunscreen and look sort of like Chappell Roan singing about oral sex in front of the NPR staff.

For more information on how to check for skin cancer, visit the Skin Cancer Foundation. They are a small but mighty nonprofit, and they do good work. Also, put on your sunscreen and wear your hat and sunglasses and take a nice walk if you can. Sunshine IS still good for you, in limited quantities, particularly in the morning. Okay, rant over!