Turning a lotion into a simple sun screen.

A little reasearch will confirm that if you want to make as-natural-a-sunscreen as possible, you can easily do so and avoid many of the unwanted chemicals in many commercial brands. We should stress that commercial sun screens undergo rigerous testing to ensure their effectiveness and that this alternative approach cannot reproduce the highly effective products that are commercially available. We would not recommend this as a product to make for commercial sale.

Firstly, you need to establish what active ingredient acts as the sun-screen. Generally, if you want to avoid chemicals, you should opt for a mineral sun screen and the most widely used mineral for this purpose is Titanium Dioxide. It appears as a main ingredient in most commercial sun screens, along with UVA/UVB absorbing chemicals, which are chemicals many of us wish to avoid. Titanium Dioxide alone will act as a very effective and natural active ingredient in your home-made sun screens or sun blocks.

Titanium Dioxide is an extremely widely used product in a whole raft of toiletries, from toothpastes to soaps and everything between. basically it's a white pigment that's completely inert and is therefore used to add whiteness and opacity to all types of toiletries. It adds whiteness and opacity by reflecting light very effectively and it's this ability to reflect light that makes it a very effective sun screen or sun block.

To turn a lotion or cream into a sun screen or effective sun block, simply add a little Titanium Dioxide to the formula. From a home-user's aspect, there is not an easy way to determine a 'factor', but simply, the proportion of Titanium Dioxide in the product determines how white it becomes and how much reflective property it will have when applied to the skin.

As guide, make a light protection sun screen by adding just 1/16th tsp of Titanium Dioxide to a recipe with similar weights of ingredients to our simple lotion recipe. To make a sun block, add up to 1/4 tsp to either the simple lotion or simple cream recipe. When applied to the skin, the whitening effect is immediate and when effectively rubbed into the skin, the propection is very effective. Creams being heavier, are often better for facial application, but lotions make better all-over-body applications.

You can easily vary the skin-softening and nourishing properties of your sun screen by choosing a lotion or cream recipe as a base which offers the ingredients you consider match your requirements.

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