Sunscreen Skepticism: An Examination of Sunscreen and Sun Exposure Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theorists and wellness influencers¹ agree that sunscreen is unhealthy and natural sunlight exposure is necessary for individual health, yet the logic behind these anti-sunscreen claims varies significantly. The mildest claims decry the potential for sunscreen-induced vitamin D deficiency. The most concerning suggest that the pharmaceutical industry invented sunscreen to actively harm public health. In between these extremes there exist numerous variations.

This article will outline three overarching types of common anti-sunscreen conspiracy theories. These theories are worth examining because they have real-life consequences for their adherents, who may forgo the use of sun protection and suffer significant health consequences as a result. As these theories spread, they can also serve as entry points to broader conspiracist movements. Additionally, though medical and wellness conspiracies might appear distinct from more concerning beliefs involving antisemitism and hardcore traditionalism, the concepts are, in fact, interrelated, meaning that seemingly trivial conspiricism about sunscreen can expose people to more overtly conspiratorial and extremist ideology. 

Sunscreen Conspiracy Types 

Anti-sunscreen conspiracies fall into three main categories:²

1. Sunscreen causes cancer or is otherwise harmful. Some influencers suggest that sunscreen use causes vitamin D deficiency, which they claim is more harmful than the potential risk of skin cancer. Others insist that chemical sunscreens themselves cause cancer. Some even claim that chemical sunscreens can be found in neurons 10 years after use, which they interpret as further proof of sunscreens’ deleterious impact. Many claim chemical sunscreens cook or burn on your skin when exposed to sunlight or inhibit cellular respiration. The most extreme assertions in this group claim that getting sunburned is less harmful to DNA than the cell damage they believe results from being in the sun while wearing sunscreen. 
2. Sunscreen divorces us from our nature and the health benefits of the sun. Influencers with a more spiritual bent, who often call themselves “sun-worshippers,” focus on the naturalness of sun exposure and the way in which sunscreen inhibits this natural, “ancient” relationship. Sunscreen divorces us from our natural state and interrupts the health benefits we receive from the sun, including but not limited to preventing cancer, strengthening muscles and nerves, curing baldness, eliminating spinal conditions, lowering blood pressure, purifying blood, increasing testosterone, and lowering risk of breast cancer by 50%. Importantly, some influencers similarly insist that none of these benefits can occur if you wear sunglasses because, like sunscreen, sunglasses disrupt the natural combination of UVA and UVB light. Sunscreen and sunglasses, they say, get in the way of the body’s ability to act as a photoreceptor and “process” sunlight as it is meant to. Influencers note that without the sun, other creatures would die, and thus, it cannot make sense that the sun has “singled us [humans] out” and “decide[d] to be killing us while it is providing life to all other living things.”
3. Pharmaceutical companies invented sunscreen to sicken the public. The most extreme anti-sunscreen influencers insist that the only explanation for such widespread use of a harmful substance must be a conspiracy to sicken and weaken the population. The goal of this harm, they believe, is to increase the profit margins of companies who sell medicines to fix the associated health issues that they insist sunscreen causes. Healthy individuals would be a threat to the medical industry, and so it must have created and promulgated sunscreen in order to boost its profit margins, they say.

Conspiratorial Reach

Though these three theory types have distinct differences, propagators do not always stick to one type; they can move fluidly from one to another or combine multiple themes in a single post. A meme posted by an Instagram account with more than 159,000 followers shows, for example, a picture of thin, tan, white women and asks, “Why are we told to fear the single thing that is best for our health?” The caption of the post states “THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS - Healthy individuals are a threat to the trillion-dollar medical industry whose profits rely on sick people becoming dependent on drugs.” This meme blends appeals from the second and third categories of conspiricism above. When content blends and aligns multiple theories into a seemingly coherent narrative, it can lend a sense of legitimacy or wholeness to the theory and gives consumers a sense that this “explains everything,” thus further enhancing its appeal. 

It is important to note that unsupported conspiracy theories about sunscreen are not just the province of niche wellness influencers or conspiracy theorists with small followings. Influencers with tens of thousands to millions of followers regularly espouse variations of these claims. Andrew Huberman, the associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford’s medical school turned podcaster, has, for example, commented several times that he is “as scared of sunscreen as I am of melanoma” asserting without support that chemical sunscreens can be found in neurons 10 years after use. Huberman’s mainstream notoriety and legitimate scientific credentials lend a guise of credibility to his unattributed claims. In a similar vein, in 2019, Outside Magazine, a widely distributed mainstream publication with 3.4 million active readers, published an article titled “Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?” In this article, the author tells the story of a medical community who supposedly shamelessly advocates for the “deadly-sun paradigm,” promoting “a lifestyle that is killing us,” by advocating for the use of sunscreen. By presenting these theories to their broad, mainstream audiences, these influencers and outlets normalize unproven conspiracies, often using pseudo-scientific language that lends authority to questionable claims. 

Consequences of this Conspiracy

Anti-sunscreen rhetoric has several consequences. First, it can have real health implications for individuals who follow the advice of these well-known influencers, who often market themselves as healthcare professionals or scientific experts. Sunscreen and other sun protections can significantly lower incidences of skin cancer and photoaging. Advising against their use can increase the likelihood that individuals engage in dangerous levels of unprotected sun exposure. 

Second, sunscreen conspiricism can originate from and pull consumers into more conspiracy-minded or extremist spaces. Several of these theories fall squarely within the “conspirituality” world, in which conspiracy theories and new age wellness beliefs overlap to form an alternative worldview.³ Continuing into the conspirituality world will often expose users to more extreme conspiricism content about the medical establishment, the shadow government, and eventually QAnon.

A number of these influencers root their claims in traditionalist conservatism. Posts blame the ills of today’s society on modernization, lamenting “people before the 1980s were lean, attractive, and healthy, where did it all go wrong?” The answers these influencers provide range from the pharmaceutical industry’s plot to make society fat, feminized, and vitamin D deficient, to electro-magnetic fields (EMFs) causing DNA damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, and “various cancers.” This is often framed as a war of gender ideology, as this Instagram post makes clear: “There has been a covert agenda for a long time to make the modern man obsolete… . Eliminating the strong male role model weakens the family unit, which is the backbone of a healthy society.” This corresponds to a broader concern in the wellness and conspirituality space and in certain conservative circles that modern medicine and mainstream culture seek to strip men of their masculinity. In fact, skin cancer poses a higher risk to men, who develop it at a higher rate and are more likely than women to die of skin cancer from ages 15 to 39.

Some influencers trace their anti-sunscreen beliefs to the practice of Germanic New Medicine. Originated by Ryke Geerd Hamer, Germanic New Medicine claims that every disease arises from a “shock event” that can only be addressed by resolving the resulting psychological conflict. Hamer proposed Germanic New Medicine as an alternative to mainstream clinical medicine, which he viewed as a part of a Jewish conspiracy to eliminate non-Jews. He cited both chemotherapy and morphine as tools of mass murder of Western civilization by this purported Jewish conspiracy. “Western civilization” is coded as white. For some conspiracists, sunscreen is one of many tools of Jewish people use to undermine whiteness. These antisemitic currents are made overt, for example, in posts on 4chan claiming that “Sunscreen is a Jewish trick.” 

Racism plays other roles in these conspiracies. Traditionalist conservative influencers implicitly and explicitly seek a return to an imagined world in which thin, healthy, white people predominate. On one traditionalist account, several posts show videos filmed using ultraviolet light in which white women put sunscreen on their face. Under the ultraviolet light, the sunscreen appears to darken the women’s skin as they apply it until their faces are fully covered in a black substance. The caption to this video states “It’s a no from me. I think I’ll take my chances and trust that massive ball of light in the sky that God placed to sustain all life on earth rather than some chemical concoction put together in a factory.” The post does not explicitly convey racism, but instead assumes certain audiences will react instinctively with disgust at watching a white woman darken her skin. 

Anti-sunscreen conspiracy theories originate from a wide variety of sources, varying in tone and hysteria. Like other wellness conspiracy theories, they all share the potential consequence of leading viewers to make dangerous health decisions against the strong consensus of the scientific community. Some go further, placing use of sunscreen and the companies who sell it at the center of a conspiracy to harm the public, or possibly just white people, either for profit, or to weaken western civilization, or both. These theories fit into a broader wellness narrative that will be explored in future research posts. 

^[1] The author reviewed the accounts of key wellness influencers on popular social media platforms. Links to the cited content will not be provided to avoid driving additional traffic to them.

^[2] This article will not attempt to debunk each claim. For information on sunscreen efficacy and the health effects of sun exposure, please see:

;https://www.aad.org/media/stats-sunscreen

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7759112/; 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6143037/;

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-science-of-sunscreen.

^[3] See also Conspirituality 153: “The Anti-Sunscreen Movement (w/ Sara Aniano and Michelle Wong)”