Say what you will about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but the man has got a nice tan. He’s got that youthful, coppery hue that signifies virility and prosperity in the modern white male. I’m not sure anyone has ever asked him about his skin care routine, but we do know a bit about his skin care politics.

Back in 2020, DeSantis and the Republican-led Florida legislature overturned a measure by municipal authorities in Key West that would have banned the sale of sunscreen that contained oxybenzone. Oxybenzone is an aromatic ketone that is a highly effective absorber of both UVA and UVB radiation. It is commonplace in plastic toys, food packaging, paints, and most anything that can be damaged by long-term exposure to sunlight. But oxybenzone, the same substance that helps keep Governor DeSantis’s skin just white enough, has also been suspected of contributing to the bleaching of coral reefs.¹ The Key West sunscreen ban was passed to protect coral, and it was modeled on a 2018 ban on oxybenzone-containing sunscreens in Hawai’i . Bans were later approved in the US Virgin Islands, Aruba, Palau, Thailand, and Bonaire.

The controversy over oxybenzone reminds us that, as Mél Hogan puts it, “Life is sun in the skin.”² The skin is not the hard border of the body’s interior, but a porous membrane, a surface of radiochemical encounters where climate becomes body and body becomes climate.

Sunscreen is a chemical supplement to the dermal membrane, a kind of second skin. It’s not the only one we use. The body that is kept warm and dry on one day in “waterproof, windproof, breathable” Gore-Tex (which often contains carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS), might on another day be insulated from UV radiation by a sunscreen containing oxybenzone. Substances like oxybenzone and PFAS leech into bodies via the skin, but like psychopharmaceuticals (see Livingston, this issue) they also leak out into water, air, and soil.

The Porous Membrane

Oxybenzone is sometimes referred to as a “UV filter.” It doesn’t so much block dangerous UV rays as prevent them from penetrating the inner layer of the skin, the dermis. As a Stanford University study explains, oxybenzone works by first absorbing UV light and then deflecting “light energy as heat.”³

Coral reefs are filtration systems, too. Corals support filter feeders like sponges, which form another sort of membrane, one that absorbs and expels pollutants from seawater. But as the Stanford study found, when oxybenzone is metabolized inside corals, “the resulting substance [forms] damaging radicals when exposed to sunlight.” When it is absorbed into reefs, oxybenzone makes sunlight more dangerous for corals, contributing to the process known as bleaching, a sign that a reef is in critical condition.

The irony is obvious. Some fourteen thousand tons of sunscreen are washed off of swimmers’ bodies and into reef systems every year. The temporary chemical membrane formed by sunscreen permits nature lovers to cultivate a youthful appearance and to prevent unsightly burns, while gazing with wonder upon the dazzling color spectrum of coral reefs. But when it breaks down in the water, this very same membrane helps destroy that color. The upshot is that ecotourism kills its object.

The idea that more attention paid to reefs from well-intentioned, affluent, mostly white tourists may do more harm than good is not news. Such Anthropocene leisure activities have shaped economic development projects in small island states for some time.⁴ So it is not surprising that the first calls to ban oxybenzone in the US came from Hawai’i. There, a sensitivity to the continued settler exploitation of natural resources exists alongside a recognition of the economic reality that ecotourism means jobs and tax revenue.

Scientists advocating for the ban in the medical journal Lancet Planetary Health quoted the Hawai’ian proverb, “Though the sea be deep and rough, the coral rock remains standing.”⁵ This is as much a statement about the enduring presence of Indigenous islanders as it is about the extraordinary longevity of corals, whose colonies can last for thousands of years. Reconciling the use of cosmetics to preserve the fleeting appearance of youthful skin with the effort to sustain ecosystems whose lifespans transcend hundreds of human generations is no easy task.

Cosmetic Solutions

Sunscreen is designed to mediate between inside and outside. It seeps into the pores to the point of invisibility, and its intended effect is to modulate a body’s exposure to UV rays. Modulate, not eliminate. Sunscreen allows users to imbibe the sun without overdosing. Products tend to be formulated with synthetic fragrances that mimic coconuts, bananas, and flowers, as if to reinforce the dominant assumption that a communion with sunlight is a communion with tropical nature itself.

Sunscreen looks and smells like a cosmetic, but its value is in its efficacy as a tool for securing health. Sunscreen is promoted by its corporate makers and government regulators as a means of preventing both skin cancer, undeniably a health issue, and the visible signs of aging, an issue that crosscuts health and aesthetics. A coral reef’s glowing beauty is a sign of its health, too, but corals age at a radically different pace, forming the structure of reefs over thousands of years—which is countless epochs of changing beauty standards.

Around the time of the DeSantis and Key West dustup, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York took to social media to point out that the sunscreens on American markets—laden with ingredients like oxybenzone—were obsolete. In a video that was part policy brief and part skin care vlog, Ocasio-Cortez appeared with Charlotte Palermino, Chief Brand Officer of Dieux Cosmetics. Together, they informed viewers that in Korea and Europe, consumers have access to “better” UV filtration creams, with newer and safer ingredients.

The reason for this gap in innovation, Ocasio-Cortez explained, is regulatory. Since the 1970s, the US government has regulated sunscreen via the Food and Drug Administration as an over-the-counter drug; most other countries regulate it as a functional cosmetic. Ocasio-Cortez won the support of some of her Republican colleagues when she called for an end to the bureaucratic red tape that was hampering Americans’ access to safer sun protection alternatives. Just as DeSantis was criticized by environmentalists in the Florida Keys for his shortsighted stance on oxybenzone, Ocasio-Cortez was pilloried as a “sellout” by members of the Democratic Socialists of America, who saw her call for the deregulation of skin care as an unserious neoliberal detour from the progressive cause.⁶

But maybe Ocasio-Cortez was onto something. Skin care—care about both the youthful glow of the epidermis and the internal integrity of the dermis—can be a kind of political action. When anxious parents insist on coating their children’s skin in oily chemical membranes, they are helping to instill a sense of bodily responsibility. Children resist (I certainly did), but over time, most come to embrace sun protection as a good thing, partly because it permits sustained communion with nature.

That communion begins with the skin. This insight should be no surprise to the millions of people, from Hawai’i to Australia to India, who experience the eco-anxieties of coral bleaching alongside the racial anxieties of skin bleaching and enduring colorism. The science of UV radiation, skin, and health is thoroughly bound up with that of race. As early as the 1820s, tests were hypothesizing a relationship between skin pigmentation and the risk of sunburn. Even today, dermatology tends to treat “fair-skinned” bodies as the primary targets of sun protection measures, among other interventions.⁷ In the early twentieth century, sunbathing and tanning were growing in popularity, and during the World Wars, exposure to excessive sun became a security concern, because sunburns hampered the efficacy of fighting forces, particularly in the Pacific and North Africa. To calibrate the amount of UV radiation they admitted under their skin, holidaymakers and soldiers alike made temporary membranes out of everything from chestnut oil to benzyl salicylate to veterinary petroleum to the synthetic silk known as Celanese fabric.⁸

This membrane-making was not solely oriented to tropical exposure. In fact, the first modern sunscreen was marketed as “Glacier Cream.” It was invented in the 1950s by the Swiss chemist Franz Greiter, who also created the metric by which most people still gauge their lotion’s protective power—the Sun Protection Factor, or SPF. Sunscreen did not really become commonplace until the 1970s, around the time of the rise of the automobile safety belt (and the tanning parlor). The FDA did not begin regulating it in the US until 1978. Oxybenzone was widely integrated into most products in the 1980s, when I was a child (squirming, hiding, screaming, throwing a tantrum at the first sign of the Coppertone bottle in my mother’s hand).

It was while I was mounting my bratty resistance, sometime in the middle of the Reagan administration, that skin care and care for the planet merged. In 1983, there were nearly half a million cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer reported in the United States. By 1992, that figure had doubled.⁹ Midway through this alarming rise, in 1987, the Montreal Protocol was enacted to phase out chlorofluorocarbons and protect the ozone layer, which experts sometimes call “Earth’s natural sunscreen.”

Sunscreen enables a direct encounter not just with heat and light, but with the world’s most sensitive ecosystems, from the sunny Alpine slopes where Greiter got the idea for Glacier Cream, to the Atlantic beaches and reefs that attract thousands of visitors to Florida. When divers and snorkelers gaze upon coral reefs—as I once did at age thirteen, rebelliously un-sunscreened, leading to a second-degree blister on my shoulder—they cannot directly see the complex living infrastructure in which microbes, algae, fish, sponges, and, yes, chemicals circulate. What they see, and what they care about, is the beauty on the surface.

Applying sunscreen is one means of controlling the human aging process—of stemming the onset of wrinkles and blemishes that might turn into cancers. Bleaching, cancer, and aging are all results of the absorption and dissipation of radiation across natural and artificial membranes. The colors corals display, and which disappear due to human disturbance, are signs of a vitality that does not correspond to human conceptions of “youth.” Coral disease is not a sign of their aging, so much as a sign of an all too human desire to stave off the march of human biological time and extend the experiences of capitalized leisure. If we contemplate what gets filtered and what gets metabolized, what metastasizes, what bleaches, what wrinkles, and how, maybe we can begin to think of planetary health as a question of growing old gracefully. ⦿

1. Irus Braverman, Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (University of
   California Press, 2018). ↩︎
2. Mél Hogan, “Skin,” in Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions, ed. Cymene Howe, Jeff Diamanti, and Amelia Moore (Punctum Books, 2021), 43–48. ↩︎
3. “Stanford Report: Understanding How Sunscreens Damage Coral,” Stanford University, May 5, 2022, https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/05/coral-killing-sunscreens. ↩︎
4. Amelia Moore, Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in the Bahamas (University of California Press, 2019). ↩︎
5. Jayden Galamgam, Natalia Linou, and Eleni Linos, “Sunscreens, Cancer, and Protecting Our Planet,” Lancet Planetary Health 2, no. 11 (2018): e465–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(18)30224-9 ↩︎
6. Wilfred Chan, “Sunscreen Socialism: AOC Divides the Left with Call for Better Skincare Options,” Guardian, August 17, 2023. ↩︎
7. Angela Reyes “Real Fake Skin: Semiotics of Skin Lightening in the Philippines,” Anthropological Quarterly 93, no. 4 (2020): 653–78, https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2020.0073; Andrea Ballestero and Yesmar Oyarzun, “Devices: A Location for Feminist Analytics and Praxis,” Feminist Anthropology 3, no. 2 (2022): 227–33, https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12108. ↩︎
8. Christopher M. Rudeen, “Securing a Place in the Sun: Clothing, Exposure, and Health,” in Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine, ed. Dawn Woolley, Fiona Johnstone, Ellen Sampson, and Paula Chambers (Springer International Publishing, 2024), 133–59. ↩︎
9. Eva Rawlings Parker, “The Influence of Climate Change on Skin Cancer Incidence—A Review of the Evidence,” International Journal of Women’s Dermatology, Special Issue on Climate Change & Dermatology, 7, no. 1 (2021): 17–27, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijwd.2020.07.003. ↩︎