Pregnancy and Sunscreen Use

Sunscreens in pregnancy – Why & What? 

Using any skin care product in pregnancy needs to be a decision balancing the risk with the benefit. With that principle firmly in place, let us answer the questions one by one.

Why should sunscreen be used in pregnancy?

The single most common and troublesome problem that your skin faces during pregnancy is hyperpigmentation, which can be seen in up to 90% of pregnant women. While for most women this physiological pigmentation clears up very well after delivery, conditions like melasma tend to persist or recur. In fact, occurrence of melasma is very high, almost 70% in pregnancy.

We already know that sun exposure is the main cause of pigmentation for our skin types, something that we explored when learning about why sunscreens are essential for our skin type. And this applies to pigmentation occurring in pregnancy as well. Therefore, the most important skin care product to use in pregnancy is your sunscreen!

The next question naturally, is this:  are sunscreens safe to use in pregnancy? I will rephrase this as: What kind of sunscreens are safe to use in pregnancy?

The simple answer is this: mineral sunscreens are pregnancy safe. At this point, there are only two mineral sunscreens, zinc oxide and titanium dioxide. So we would end up choosing one of those for a pregnancy safe sunscreen. Chemical sunscreens are not recommended, at this point, for use in pregnancy - for 2 reasons. Several of the older chemical sunscreens are known to be absorbed into the body in a way that can impact the baby, and the rest of the chemical filters have not been really tried and tested to be pregnancy safe. Zinc oxide particularly is considered safe, because zinc naturally is being used by your body for multiple functions, so zinc mineral sunscreens are considered to be the safest for pregnancy. Plus, it is my favourite UV filter overall, given that it protects much better against UVA compared to titanium. 

But we could refine that a little more.

1. Look for something that is specifically non nano. Nano minerals, especially, titanium have been detected in the placenta, so would be good to stay clear from nano materials. 
2. Look for sunscreens that are free of silicones and other microplastics, exposure in the placenta to these chemical agents have been reported to have potential consequences on long term health. Silicones can be relatively easily identified by names ending with ‘cone’, ‘conol', ‘silane’ or ‘siloxane’.
3. Ideally use a durable sunscreen, which does not need to be reapplied every 8 hours. This way you end up using less product per day, which translates to the least possible exposure for your baby.
4. Avoid fragrances and additives in your sunscreen and stick to straightforward sunscreens, with a lesser number of total ingredients. Our early research has shown that number of allergens in a sunscreen increases with increasing number of ingredients.
5. Avoid botanical ingredients and essential oils where possible. Some of them are photosensitizers and may be counterproductive. For example, lemon oil seems so natural and simple to understand but is a very well known photosensitizer with known phototoxicity.
6. Between zinc and titanium, choose titanium for its ability to cover UVA and visible light more effectively. These two parts of the solar spectrum are specifically known to cause pigmentation in our skin types. And zinc oxide is a better choice here.

If these basics are in place, you should be able to use sunscreen, both safely and effectively in pregnancy, without worrying about your baby. So next, do babies need sunscreens? We will discuss this soon!

 More sunscreen topics for you to explore:

1. Why do people have different skin colours?

2. Do we really need to use sunscreens?