Do you need SPF for everyday sun exposure?
Yes. Everyday activities such as walking, commuting, sitting outside or having lunch on a terrace can expose your skin to UV, even when it doesn’t feel like you’re “in the sun”.
Nobody in the UK thinks of themselves as “in the sun” unless they’ve committed to it. Towel down, factor 30 on, book out, the full ceremony. That’s sun exposure. That’s the bit we’ve been trained to protect against.
What we’ve never quite been trained to notice is everything else. The ten minutes waiting for the bus. The lunch you ate outside because the office finally has decent weather to complain about, school runs, dog walks, the garden pub you ducked into “for one” and left three hours later, slightly pink and mildly confused about how that happened. None of that felt like sun exposure at the time. It just felt like Tuesday.
That gap, between what actually happens to your skin and what we mentally file as “being in the sun”, is where most of the damage happens. And it’s a much bigger story than any single heatwave.
The sun doesn't check your calendar!
Here’s the inconvenient bit: UV doesn’t care whether you meant to be outside. It doesn’t care if you were “just” popping to the shop, “just” having a coffee on the terrace, or “just” standing at the bus stop scrolling your phone. Over 90% of UV rays pass straight through cloud, and in the UK the sun is strong enough to damage skin from mid-March all the way through to mid-October, not just on the three days a year it’s technically hot enough to complain about. Sunburn can happen on cooler, greyer days too, according to Cancer Research UK, which is exactly the kind of fact that ruins the “it wasn’t even sunny” defence.
And the numbers on where this is heading aren’t subtle. Melanoma diagnoses in the UK hit a record high of over 20,000 cases in a single year, and that figure is projected to keep climbing to around 26,500 a year by 2040. Nearly 9 in 10 of those cases are caused by too much UV exposure from the sun or sunbeds, which means the overwhelming majority of them were, in theory, avoidable. Not through some heroic lifestyle overhaul. Just through the boring, unglamorous habit of applying and reapplying protection, on the days that didn’t feel like “sun cream days.”
We know more and still do less
The frustrating part is that awareness has genuinely gone up. Two thirds of UK adults say they understand the health and beauty case for SPF far better now than they did when they were younger. And yet, per a January 2025 YouGov survey of over 2,000 UK adults, 45% still don’t apply SPF daily, and only 55% actually know that UVA, the ray responsible for a lot of that long-term ageing and damage, is the leading cause of premature skin ageing. More people rank moisturiser as the “most important” step in their routine than they do sunscreen. We’ve somehow decided that the product for looking after our skin’s texture matters more than the product for stopping it getting damaged in the first place.
This is less about ignorance and more about categorisation. People aren’t skipping SPF because they don’t believe in it. They’re skipping it because their brain never filed “walking to a meeting” or “sitting on a terrace with a flat white” under the same heading as “being in the sun.” It’s an admin problem as much as an awareness one. Sun protection has been mentally boxed in with beach bags and holiday packing lists, not with regular Tuesdays.
The fix is smaller than the problem
The good news is that undoing this doesn’t require a personality change. It requires one habit shift: treating SPF as something you put on in the morning, the same way you’d put on deodorant or brush your teeth, rather than something you only reach for once you’ve already decided you’re “doing sun” that day.
That’s really the whole logic behind something like our Sun Lotion. It’s SPF 50 with broad UVA and UVB protection, dermatologically tested, suitable for sensitive skin, and built to be reapplied without ceremony, every one to two hours, or straight after you’ve been sweating, swimming, or towelling off.
It’s less “beach holiday essential” and more “thing that lives in your bag because you’re a person who occasionally exists outdoors,” which, it turns out, is all of us, most days, without really noticing.
You don’t need to be sunbathing to need it. You just need to spend a bit of time outside—walking somewhere, eating lunch on a bench, having a drink on a terrace. That’s most of us, most days. And this July, with the sun finally showing up properly, that’s nearly everyone.
Sources:
Melanoma skin cancer cases hit a record high in the UK:
https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2026/05/22/skin-cancer-cases-hit-record-high-in-the-uk/
New research on UK consumer attitudes to sun care:
https://www.cosmeticsdesign-europe.com/Article/2025/03/28/new-research-highlights-uk-consumer-attitudes-to-sun-care/
