HEALTH

Wellness

5 safest sunscreen picks of the season (and serious dos and don'ts)

We love spending time soaking up Mr. Sun’s warm rays, but turning lobster red? Now that’s another story! To protect your skin and avoid those ouchies, you’ve gotta do some pre-sun prep, and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has some new guidelines and top product picks to make sure you’re summer is burn-free.

Before you buy, avoid…

Aerosol sprays. Yep, they’re super easy to apply, but the EWG says there is no way to tell how much sunscreen you’ve applied or which spots you’ve missed. Worse yet, you could inhale chemicals that could damage your lungs—yikes!

A chemical called Oxybenzone. This one has turned up in some of our past faves, but research shows that it can be absorbed through the skin into the bloodstream, where it acts like the hormone estrogren. Once it’s in your body, it can cause some seriously weird health problems and trigger allergic reactions.

Towellettes. Convenient, yes, effective, not so much. There is no way to know how much sunscreen makes it from your handy dandy towellettes to your face, arms, chest, neck—anywhere. Go for the old-school variety, instead.

Bragging. A lot of companies include seals from the American Cancer Society or the Skin Cancer Foundation. This doesn’t mean that those products are any better than other products. And that “Broad Spectrum” label? Regulations are so lax, it doesn’t mean much.

Now for our top picks…