About me

Hello, I'm Sue Ingram and I've lived pretty much all of my life in Africa. I have a love of the outdoors, and sunshine and believe me, Africa gets a lot of glorious sunshine!

My dual interests in health and the environment led me to research the benefits of natural and organic products.

Together with tragic Melanoma events in my family and my love of the outdoors, I found myself focusing more specifically on sun protection.

Since starting down this road in 2010, my research quickly revealed many issues with the average sunscreens marketed globally. Together with all aspects related to embracing the sunshine, it has been an extremely interesting time.

The most controversial issue for me is the fact that although we are motivated to wear sunscreen primarily to prevent sun damage to our skin, in many cases the sunscreens themselves are shown to contain ingredients that are potentially toxic to both ourselves and the environment.

Natural sunscreens seem to offer superior protection to the synthetic chemical sunscreens, never mind being a healthier option. But resistance to their use is challenged by cost and ease of application.  

Beyond this, other points of interest to me are:

• UVA protection - needs to be strong, in balance with UVB protection. Many sunscreens still don't offer any UVA protection, never mind strong protection.
• Skin damage and skin cancers provide huge motivation to use sunscreens, but many times this is too little too late.
• Vitamin D - How best to embrace the sunshine for it's healthy benefits?
• Tanning - the good, bad and ugly.
• Besides sunscreen, what other protection?

Due to an increased global focus on health matters over the past 10 years, sunscreens have evolved to provide more of the following:

• Growth in UVA protection options and not just UVB
• Lower UVB protection levels
• More use of natural mineral sunscreens 
• Vitamin A (Retinyl Palmitate) being seen to be harmful rather than adding value to a sunscreen
• Additional ingredients to boost the body's own systems to combat any free radical creation

But beyond this, cosmetics as a whole, not just sunscreens, have focused on refraining from including toxic synthetic chemicals that are mostly included because they are cheap alternatives to the more wholly natural ingredients available.

Wishing you good health in the sun,