Prevent Sunburns with NO sunscreen

Have you ever sprayed your kids with sprayable sunscreen? Have you noticed the chemical cloud and smell that permeates the air when you spray it? I noticed. It bothered me a lot. The perma-cloud really bugged me, so I switched back to lotion…but I started thinking that if I was spraying the kids with those chemicals, and of course I was concerned that they would be breathing them in, why wasn’t I equally concerned about putting it on their skin? I started researching, and found scary, nasty ingredients like oxybenzone.

Added to THAT, one of my kids with Celiac disease was discovered to be Vitamin D deficient. Of course – I was coating her skin and not allowing her to absorb any Vitamin D from the sun! This year, I decided to try something new. We skipped the sunscreen. Now, I’m not a doctor, and I would urge you to do your own research on this, and I am NOT recommending that you go against your doctor’s advice. This is just our experience.

We started out with a ten minute outing with a light layer of coconut oil (plain coconut oil has an SPF of 10). The next day we increased to twenty minutes, then thirty the day after that, and by this point we are up to an hour of outdoor exposure. With NO SUNBURNS! None of us have gotten even slightest hint of red this summer. If we were planning to be outdoors for hours, I would probably break out the bottle of sunscreen (preferably one of the more natural brands), but it hasn’t been necessary so far.

I was meeting with a sweet friend and explaining how we were skipping the sunscreen this year, and when I asked her what she used for sunscreen, she very politely told me that she’d been doing the same thing for years! So that totally burst my bubble, and I felt like Captain Obvious…but I thought I’d share my experience with you anyway. If you already do this, I would seriously love to hear how you naturally keep sunburns away!