The Sun Isn’t Your Enemy — But The Narrative Might Be
For years we’ve been told to fear the sun.
UV is bad. Cover up. Sunscreen. Shade.
We spend our lives indoors under artificial light. We drive in UV-blocked cars, move from building to building, wear sunglasses from morning to night — and when we finally step outside, we’re told to immediately layer on SPF 50.
Meanwhile: fatigue. Hormone imbalance. Skin conditions. Anxiety. Sleep that doesn’t restore. Bones that thin earlier than they should. Every one of those has been independently linked to low vitamin D. Correlation isn’t causation — but it’s a long list, and the same name keeps coming up.
So is the sun really the problem?
Or have we forgotten how to have a relationship with it?
What the sun actually does
The sun isn’t decoration. It’s an input your body is built to use.
Vitamin D is synthesised in the skin from UVB — not swallowed, made. It underpins immune function and bone health. Morning light anchors the circadian rhythm that governs when you sleep and how well. Light exposure influences serotonin, and through it, mood. Blood pressure responds to it.
Everything in nature thrives in sunlight. So do we, in balance.
What you eat changes how your skin meets the sun, too. A nutrient-dense diet — lower in industrial seed oils — is not a small variable.
Shake’s position is simple: go to the natural first. Not because natural is automatically safe, but because the burden of proof should sit with the synthetic thing you’re putting on the largest organ you own.
What we put on our skin
Skin absorbs. That isn’t a wellness claim, it’s the mechanism.
In 2019 and 2020 the FDA ran trials on how much sunscreen actually gets into the bloodstream. The 2020 study tested six common chemical filters — avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, homosalate, octisalate and octinoxate. All six crossed into plasma above 0.5 ng/mL, the level at which the FDA’s own guidance requires further toxicology testing.
Oxybenzone reached 258.1 ng/mL. That is roughly five hundred times the threshold, after a single application.
Absorption is established. What it means over a lifetime is still being studied — and we’ll say that plainly rather than fill the gap with alarm. But “we haven’t finished testing this” is a different sentence from “this is safe,” and the two get used interchangeably.
Oxybenzone and octinoxate both sit on the Shake list of ingredients to avoid — flagged for endocrine activity and for reef toxicity at parts-per-billion. Hawaii banned the sale of sunscreens containing either one under Act 104, signed in 2018 and in force since January 2021. It was the first law of its kind in the United States.
That list isn’t opinion. It’s the same list that runs behind every score we publish, and you can check any product against it yourself.
And yes — skin cancer is real
South Africa has among the highest skin cancer rates in the world. Repeated burning raises melanoma risk. Nothing here argues otherwise.
Sun exposure and sun damage are not the same thing. The difference is burning.
That’s the whole argument. Not sun versus no sun — dose versus damage.
What we still don’t know
There’s growing research on how different wavelengths behave in the body — UVA, UVB, and the near-infrared that makes up more than half of what reaches us. Infrared appears to penetrate deeper than UV and may play a role we’ve only started to map.
We’re not going to pretend that’s settled. It’s genuinely live, and it’s on our list to go deeper on.
Conscious sun habits
This isn’t about fear. It’s about sensible time in the light, and not burning.
Burning is inflammation, not nourishment.
When you’re out longer:
Slip into a long-sleeve — cotton or linen. Not polyester, not nylon. Wearing plastic in the heat is its own conversation, and one we’ll have.
Slop on mineral sunscreen. Zinc sits on the skin and reflects. Chemical filters absorb into it.
Slap on a hat. The wider the better. Consider this your written permission to buy the ridiculous one.
Seek shade when your body says enough. A coconut tree if you’re lucky, a doorway if you’re not.
Slide under that shade rather than reaching for sunglasses first. Your eyes are how your body reads the time of day — that’s the mechanism behind circadian rhythm — so covering them from dawn to dusk isn’t free. Shade lets you get out of the glare without switching off the signal.
Hydrate. Listen to your body. Don’t burn.
The Australian Cancer Council coined Slip, Slop, Slap, Seek, Slide. We’ve borrowed it, and taken one small liberty with the last one.
A natural light reset
Anchor your rhythm:
- Step outside near sunrise
- Barefoot if you can
- Let the light reach your eyes — no sunglasses, no contacts
- A few minutes is enough
The benefit comes from daylight reaching the eye. You do not need to look at the sun for this to work — and you shouldn’t.
The choice
Not right versus wrong. Conscious versus unconscious.
You can keep avoiding the sun and layering on filters you’ve never read the label of. Or you can build a relationship with light: sensible hours, covered when it counts, a mineral barrier when you need one, and never burning.
If you want to check what’s actually in the bottle you already own, here’s what we look for:
Avoid — oxybenzone, octinoxate, octocrylene, homosalate, added fragrance, parabens
Look for — non-nano zinc oxide, a short ingredient list, no synthetic fragrance, reef-safe evidence rather than reef-safe wording
We score every brand we cover against four pillars — People, Animals, Gaia, Frequency — and we publish the reasoning, including where a brand loses points. You don’t have to take our word for any of it. That’s the point.
Both are choices. Only one is yours.
#SunSmartNotSunScared · #shakemediahub · #ConsciousSunHabits · #MineralSunscreen · #VitaminD
