Catch 22: Save Your skin or kill the Corals?

You finally have a day off from that job, or that internship. You rally your friends, pack the coolers and head of to a beach vacay for the weekend. In your canvas bag of essentials, you’ve got your excessively large floppy hat, your flip flops and your sunscreen–because you want to look this good when you’re 80. That bottle of sunscreen cost you probably $5.79 at CVS, and was a last minute buy on the way.

Reapply every two hours and continue having fun, but each time you take a dip in the ocean, a little layer of sunscreen washes off in the rumbling, salty ocean. That small layer, which you thought was absorbed into your skin to protect it, is now sitting as a glossy layer of pollution in the ocean.

Sunscreen is great. It is used to protect our skin from the ultraviolet rays that cause skin-cancer, wrinkles, and hurt the next day as the worst sunburn of your life. Dermatologists recommend wearing it even when you’re at home, running errands and going about your life. The problem, just like anything, is that too much of a good thing isn’t good anymore.

Why are bad sunscreens risky business?

According to NOAA, conventional sunscreens contain harmful products with fancy names like Oxybenxone, nano-Titanium dioxide, Octinoxate, Octocrylene and Benzophenone-1. In addition to being impossible to pronounce, these little names contribute to massive harm in marine environments. Remember how excited you were to see the dolphins jumping way out at sea? Sunscreen can accumulate in their tissues and be transferred to their young. That dinner of mussels you were looking forward to? Sunscreen can cause defects in the young. Decreased fertility in fish, damaged immune and reproductive systems in sea urchins, bleaching and deformities in corals, impaired photosynthesis in algae, and a toppling of the food pyramid so severe that going to the beach just isn’t fun anymore.

Some of the best-rated sunscreens based on environmentalism, price, and quality:

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What can you do?

Solving this problem is easy if you know about it:

1. Buy a coral-safe sunscreen: Any of the following will do.

2. Grab lunch or an ice cream during the hottest parts of the day. Your skin will thank you, and so will the ocean.

3. Try a mineral sunblock instead!

4. Read before you buy! Learning what some of the names of harmful products in sunscreen are can help reduce bad spending.

5. Dollar vote for the planet. Not buying the bad sunscreens means not supporting a business that can’t continue without customers. Aware movement away helps.

6. Tell your friends. You might not see the impact that you have, but the ripple effects of helping someone make a change will.

Sometimes paying more for sunscreen is worth the quality as well as what it does for the planet. Using it correctly means that it will last you long enough to ammortize the price.

You’ve had the most wonderful day at the shore with your friends. Your skin is warm and balmy. Fresh tan is setting in. You hop in a cool, refreshing shower before you leave to get the sand off. Changing into a sun dress for dinner, the last of the sunscreen that was intended to protect your body finds its way into the environment, as the full cycle of sunscreen has finally concluded.