My Personal Experience with Actinic Keratoses
Looking Back
It's
unclear exactly who invented sunscreen, but this much we do know.
In the early 1930's, a young chemist in South Australia, HA Milton
Blake, with some friends, first experimented in a kitchen to
produce a sunburn cream. The University of Adelaide tested
the product, gave it the thumbs up, and Hamilton Laboratories
was born. Today,
Milton’s son Richard Blake is at
the helm of Hamilton Laboratories.
In 1936, just a year before I was born, a French scientist named Eugene Schueller, who founded L'Oreal, invented the first sunscreen according to the company web site.
Then, in 1944, a Florida pharmacist in Miami Beach named Benjamin Green invented a suntan cream in his kitchen called "Coppertone Suntan Cream" . A year later in 1945, "Coppertone Suntan Oil" was added to the line, promoted by Green's slogan, "Don't be a pale face".
The following year, I began delivering newspapers by bike every afternoon and on Sunday morning. It didn't take long to get a good tan and I thought that tan was cool. I didn't realize at the time that a tan was the bodies final desperate attempt to prevent further UV damage to the skin.
Sometime around 1953 or 1954, a little girl joined the pale face slogan on Coppertone advertisements in the Miami area. In 1955, the slogan "Tan ... don't burn ... use Coppertone" appeared and in 1956, the world-famous "Little Miss Coppertone" and the black cocker spaniel icons were created.
About that time, I gave up the paper route and started delivering telegrams by bike after school in downtown San Diego. One year I biked over 7500 miles ... that's a lot of time in the sun! I can remember thinking how really cool and healthy that dark tan looked! In reality, I was just becoming a statistic: "80% of lifetime sun exposure is estimated to occur before the age of 18. Just one bad blistering sunburn during childhood can double the risk of skin cancer later in life." Back then, it seems most people didn't think about skin damage all that much and knew nothing about "sun block" unless you covered your face with zinc oxide like some lifeguards covered their noses.
It was many years later, in 1980, that Coppertone developed the first UVA/UVB sunscreen but it really wasn't designed for active people who might sweat a lot or for those involved in water sports. If you happened to get in your eyes, which wasn't hard to do if you were active, it really stung.
When I began windsurfing in 1986, I was still thinking that the best way to avoid the discomforts of sunburn was to get a good tan! If anyone had suggested a better way was to stay out of the sun, that of course would have been unthinkable and totally impossible.
In 1991, Coppertone introduced the first sweat proof sport sunscreen and two years later, the first waterproof sunscreen product for kids. Since that time a number of sunscreens have appeared on the market advertising "waterproof", "won't sting the eyes", "total sun block", "lasts eight hours", etc. I regret we didn't have these kinds of products when I was a kid because most skin damage happens to kids but doesn't show up until years later: early wrinkling, skin cancer and other skin problems, along with the possibility of cataract and macular degeneration (both of which are leading causes of blindness), and pterygium (pronounced "ter-ridge-ium", an abnormal fleshy growth of the membrane that covers the white of the eye). A pterygium may remain small or grow large enough to interfere with vision It commonly occurs on the inner corner of the eye. While the exact cause is not well understood, it is known that pterygium occurs more often in people who spend a great deal of time outdoors, especially in sunny climates.
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SUN DAMAGE due to overexposure to the sun's UVA and UVB rays |
 PTERYGIUM involving the cornea of the eye. |
