If you could make sunscreen with items found in your kitchen pantry, should you do it? Posts from social media influencers and bloggers including recipes to make your own sunscreen have been wildly circulated online, but the dermatologists who spoke to CTVNews.ca call it a “horrible idea.” Sunscreen recipes trending online One example of this trend is from TikTok creator Nara Smith, known for her soft-spoken voiceovers documenting made-from-scratch recipes.
She recently shared a video of her and her husband’s homemade sunscreen recipe to her more than eight million followers. The information you need to know, sent directly to you: Download the CTV News App “We all burn pretty easily, so we went with something with a little bit more SPF,” Smith says, as her husband scoops out coconut oil into a glass bowl before mixing in beeswax pellets, shea butter, jojoba oil and, later, zinc oxide to the mixture. There are several other at-home sunscreen recipes online using oils that can be bought from a grocery store, such as avocado, red raspberry seed and carrot seed oils.
Some recipes even tout zinc-oxide-free concoctions. Is homemade sunscreen safe? While some recipes make it look easy enough to make at home, experts caution against it. “It’s a horrible idea and an unnecessary practice.
At best, it’s wasting materials and, at worst, it’s going to damage somebody’s skin, either from the material itself or from the lack of protection when they then go out in the sun.