In Case You Need To Hear It: No, You Can’t Make Sunscreen At Home

On Wednesday, Nara Smith posted a video on TikTok where her husband Lucky Blue Smith makes “homemade sunscreen”. At the time of writing, the video has had 11.7 million views, 1.5 million likes and has garnered more than 17K comments. The reception has been mixed, with dermatologists asking her to not post videos about making DIY sunscreen, parents saying this will be the perfect sun protection for their children who have eczema, and countless others saying they didn’t even know it was possible to make sunscreen from scratch. 

The unfortunate thing about this video is that, as any scientist or reputable medical or research facility will tell you, attempting to make sunscreen at home is not a good idea. I don't even want to share the video here, at the risk of giving anyone ideas.

Before this, Nara’s videos have been fairly innocuous. She’s built an 8.1 million-strong following from her soothing voiceovers that narrate her making all manner of things in her kitchen. Mozzarella, gum, Nutella (while wearing head-to-toe Chanel from the pre-fall '24 collection); if she’s run out of something, she can make it from scratch. And we lap it up. 

Her videos have had a collective 342.3 million likes, and often, her comment section is cackle-inducing, with people joking about the other things they’d love her to make from scratch — everything from phone screen protectors to balloons and the Laneige lip mask. In one video, where Lucky Blue narrates her doing her skincare routine, the official Samsung Nordics page even jokes “what if you run out of skin?” in a comment that has now had 11.7K likes. Unlike many other corners of the internet, her followers are seemingly laughing with her, not at her. This is clearly what Nara wants, as she’s often spotted commenting on satirical recreations of her videos with laughing emojis. 

Most of these videos start in the same way. “We were about to go to bed when I realised we were all out of toothpaste, so my husband went downstairs to make some,” starts one. “This morning, my toddlers requested some Corn Flakes for breakfast, but I don’t usually keep those in the house, so I just decided to make them,” begins another. 

This is true for her most recent video, too. “We’ve been spending a lot of time outside by the pool and I realised that we ran out of sunscreen, but I asked Lucky to make me some,” she starts. “We all burn pretty easily, so we went with something with a little bit more SPF.” Lucky then adds coconut oil, beeswax, shea butter, cocoa butter, and jojoba oil, before dropping in the supposed magical ingredient: zinc oxide powder. He places the concoction in the fridge and once solid, they apply it. “This went on so smooth and didn’t leave a white cast,” she finishes. 

The concept of homemade sunscreen isn’t new. Sadly, a quick Google doesn’t return pages from scientific institutions warning us against them, but instead, endless recipes. To be clear, warnings against cooking up sunscreen at home do exist — they’re just not the first results you’ll see on Google. The issue is actually so common that the Cancer Council (Australia’s leading independent authority on evidence-based information relating to cancer), has an entire FAQ page dedicated to the risks.

The Cancer Council is extremely clear in its advice: “Cancer Council does not recommend making or using homemade sunscreen. Instead, leave sunscreen manufacture to the experts so you know that what you’re using is safe and effective.” It explains that while the ingredients in homemade sunscreen (specifically, zinc oxide and titanium dioxide) do provide some sun protection, they also need to be included in sunscreen formulations at the correct concentrations and also be distributed evenly within the product to provide protection. "This is unlikely to be achieved in the home,” says the Cancer Council. 

This is also backed up by Dr Michelle Wong (@labmuffinbeautyscience), an Australian cosmetic chemist, who as always, breaks it down in a way that we can all understand:

The consensus is clear. “Homemade zinc oxide sunscreens do not work that well,” says Wong. In Australia, sunscreen is subject to rigorous testing by the Federal Government’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), which ensures that only ingredients where safety and efficacy are ensured can be included in a sunscreen formulation. As part of this testing process, a sunscreen is also given an SPF rating (for example, SPF 30 or SPF 50+) to indicate the level of UV protection the sunscreen offers. None of that is possible with a homemade SPF. 

In the video above, Wong also points to a 2020 study that tested 15 at-home sunscreen recipes to assess their level of photoprotective efficacy (i.e. whether they actually provide sun protection). Of those 15 recipes, three were found to have no sunscreen properties at all, and the remaining 12 all showed an SPF of less than six. 

To put that into perspective, Australians are recommended to use sunscreen that has a minimum SPF rating of 30. There’s a good reason for this, as SPF is one of the best lines of defence we have against the sun (along with protective clothing and avoiding the sun as much as possible). In a country where two-thirds of the population will be diagnosed with some form of skin cancer in their lifetime, and where 90% of non-melanoma skin cancers are attributed to sun exposure (that statistic is 95% for melanoma), that’s serious business. 

Though Nara is by no means the only influencer spruiking homemade sunscreen on social media, she might be one of the most followed. Of course we can acknowledge that she doesn’t purport to be an expert on the topic, and she thankfully isn’t playing into the common rhetoric that sunscreen is toxic (it isn’t). She isn’t even telling other people to try it themselves. But the impact of posting a video like this is significant: millions of people who might never have considered making their own sunscreen are now seeing someone say that it’s possible — and easy.

Thankfully there are plenty of comments under her video asking Nara not to post harmful videos like this, and we can only hope that it’s that message that most people are taking away from it.