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Do You Really Need a Sunscreen With Blue Light Protection?

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Geekz Snow
Do You Really Need a Sunscreen With Blue Light Protection?

It’s close in wavelength to skin’s No.

Dermatologists and photobiologists have been researching blue light’s effects on skin over the past decade and have published contradicting results, some finding that it can cause skin cell death, hyperpigmentation, ageing and the production of free radicals, while others have found more positive effects in the form of wound healing in rats, the clearing of acne, and treatment of jaundice in newborns.

These intensities, whether “normal” or amped up, are far beyond what the average person could expect to experience emanating from their phone or computer screen.

In an excellent blog post tackling this question, chemist and science communicator Michelle Wong compared different brightness studies and found that brighter screens like an iMac were 100 times less damaging than the Sun’s visible spectrum alone, and smaller screens like a smartphone were 2,000 times less damaging.

In one study, researchers found that in human skin irradiated by sunlight, 67 percent of free radicals generated were caused by UV light, while 33 percent were caused by visible light.

Another experiment found that melasma patients who used a sunscreen that included visible light protection (in the form of iron oxides, a pigment often used in tinted sunscreens) saw greater fading of darkened patches on their skin than patients who were only protected from UV light.

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Geekz Snow
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