No outfit is complete without a spritz of your favourite perfume, whether it's an elaborate get-up or a simple everyday look. But before you spray, it might be worth rethinking where you splash on your favourite scent.
By now, we should all have a dedicated SPF routine to protect us from the sun's harmful rays year-round, but there could be one blind spot when it comes to your sun protection: how perfume can affect your skin.
Jennifer Rock, CEO of Skingredients and The Skin Nerd, joined Laura Fox on RTÉ 2fm to discuss summer skincare and how spraying perfume directly on sensitive skin can lead to pigmentation.
"Pigment is something we're all born with", Rock says. "It's like how you have a colour in your eye, you've pigment within your skin, it's what determines your natural, genetic, born skin colour.
"Ultimately, what happens throughout the years is you might get a cut, you might have a burn, lots of things tend to happen to the skin, and as a result, we tend to see the pigment in the skin change."
This is due to melanocyte cells that are found in the lower part of our skin and can be penetrated by trauma, such as cuts or burns, and light. This causes them to either over-produce or under-produce pigment, resulting in dark freckles or lighter spots.
Areas such as necks and chests are particularly vulnerable to this kind of pigmentation, Rock adds, as we typically don't cover these areas in the sun.
"If you feel you've got little white speckles on the skin, no matter what the skin colour is originally, that really needs protection because you don't have any melanin cells protecting you there anymore. Whereas if you've darkening of the skin, it's more aesthetic, it does show that the skin is damaged underneath, it does show that the skin needs protection, but it still has and is protecting itself."
You can help protect that skin by being more careful about where you spray your perfume, she notes. As a perfume fanatic, this is a point Rock is eager to share with listeners.
"I love perfume. Adore, adore perfume. Even if I'm going on a Zoom call, I have to have a spritz of perfume so that I feel like I'm ready to rock and roll.
"Ultimately, when you spray perfume onto the skin, you're usually allowing for the scent to mix with your natural pheromones and therefore, scents smell different on everyone."
The high alcohol content of perfumes help give fragrances their potency and longevity, but consistently spraying this "neat alcohol" onto your skin can weaken it. "Then you go out and you can expose yourself to light and that's where an awful lot of sun damage can come in the future", she adds.
"So I'm not saying don't spray perfume. I'm saying, lash it on the clothes but don't put it onto those direct areas of the skin. Even into the wrist is probably safer or behind the ear as you would see in the olden movies."
When it comes to general sun-safe skincare, Rock reiterated how important it is to use the right SPF, year-round. SPF is, she says, "a 365-piece in Ireland" due to the two types of UV rays we are exposed to.
"Between April to May to September, you're exposed to what's called the UVB rays, otherwise known as the 'burning ray'. It's the ray that when, over the weekend, we're all half-naked walking around because the weather felt so beautiful and you want to get that vitamin D into your skin."
Getting your daily dose of vitamin D is important, Rock says, but so is protecting yourself from excess sun exposure.
The UVA ray, meanwhile, is present throughout the year and is "silent and doesn't come with heat, so you're somewhat ignorant to its existence".
When looking for SPF, the number factor - 30 or 50 and so on - tells you the level of protection it gives you against the UVB ray. Rock says that wearing SPF 30 and above is best, as recommended by most skin cancer organisations across the globe.
And if you're wondering how much suncream you need to adequately protect your whole body, Rock has the answer to that too: 33ml for your whole body, which is roughly a shot-glass amount.
For more summer skincare tips about staying safe in the sun, listen back to the full interview above.
For more advice, read the HSE's guidelines on protecting your skin in the sun.
