“I don't use sunscreen, never have used sunscreen. It stops my ability to absorb the sun.”
The well-proportioned surf star Laird Hamilton, a man who has been a study in good health and beauty for sixty years and who regularly features on “world’s sexiest” lists, has come out and said what a surprising number of high-profile surfers believe, that sunscreen ain’t so great.
Our hero lives in Malibu in summer, Maui in winter, and therefore consumes much sun.
Has it killed him?
On the contrary,
“If there’s no sun, there’s no life. I solar gaze, I’m into solar gazing. I go early in the morning, when I can, and watch the sun. It affects my whole system. I don’t use sunscreen, never have used sunscreen. I’m not a big fan of sunscreen because it’s stopping my ability to absorb the sun,” says Laird.
He describes the effects of sun exposure as being very similar to reading BeachGrit, ie, anti-depressive.
“You just know how it affects you. If it’s raining for three weeks, I can tell you, like when I go get in a blue sky with the sun, I’m like, oh yeah, it’s like I bathe in it. The sun’s the king.”
If you don’t believe him, Laird suggests a simple experiment.
“Take a plant in the garden and spray it with sunscreen for a month and then see what happens. The thing dies,” he says. “If you think you’re not as connected to the sun as the plant is are you’re crazy. I mean we have all these diseases that you get when you’re not in the sun, besides depression. We have actual sicknesses that are from not enough sunlight. We’re all connected to the sun and we all should have a relationship.”
If you don’t wanna take it from Laird Hamilton, you just peel open a history book, he says.
“You know, they say that we’re the first culture in history that doesn’t worship the sun. We fear it. We hide. We put on sunscreen.”
I lean towards Laird on this topic, as I do on most, and prefer a little zinc on the beak and the décolletage while wearing scoop necks but rarely touch the white compounds that get smeared on backs, faces and limbs.
So far so good.
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