Make Your Own Sunscreen with Zinc Oxide and Beeswax

With the 4th of July coming up soon, plenty of you are probably going to be spending time in the sun. Instead of buying bottle after bottle of sunscreen, make your own.

WonderHowTo has a brief guide on how to make your own sunscreen. The key ingredient here is the zinc oxide. In sun screen, zinc oxide is used to scatter light waves in the UV-A spectrum. As Physics.org explains:

Sunscreens help to filter out UV radiation using a combination of two main types of active ingredients. Inorganic particles, such as titanium dioxide or zinc oxide, form a physical barrier, reflecting or scattering UV waves. Organic components meanwhile absorb UV rays and release their energy as heat.

The recipe provided may not have as great of a shelf-life as store-bought sunscreen, but you can get the ingredients for fairly cheap and make several batches from them. Check out WonderHowTo for the full recipe.

How to Make Your Own Non-Toxic Sunscreen at Home | WonderHowTo

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Keep Sunscreen in a Cooler for Better Comfort and Effectiveness

If you're going to be out in the sun all day, sunscreen is your friend. However, warm, slimy, and runny sunscreen is a very unpleasant friend. Protect your skin and make putting on sunscreen more comfortable by keeping the bottle in a cooler bag.

This tip comes from the Be It Ever So Humble blog, where Mrs. Mordecai writes:

I put the sunscreen in an insulated lunchbox and kept an ice pack in the top when we were away from home. Not only has the sunscreen remained effective through the summer (we have had NO sunburns this summer, hooray!), it has been much nicer to put on. I hate putting on warm, oily, slimy sunscreen.

As a bonus, the sunscreen is always corralled in one place now, and it's easy to grab if we want to take it with us.

Toss your sunscreen in the cooler when you head to the beach not only to prevent the sunscreen from becoming gross and separated, but also to keep it from losing its effectiveness.

Keeping Sunscreen Cool | Be It Ever So Humble via Parent Hacks

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