Drinkable Sunscreen

Wow… I didn’t know this even existed! I was researching for posts on a Japanese website and thought I saw the words ‘sunscreen drink’ – translations aren’t always reliable so I put it into Google and found UVO. I guess if you think about the whole collagen supplement and ‘beauty’ drink thing, it was only a matter of time before a sunscreen supplement became available in the form of a drink. Sunscreen supplements do exist in tablet form; they’re very careful about what they claim to do and you won’t see an SPF rating on them (or any that I’ve seen). It’s a little sneaky, I think, that the 30+ on the bottle is the number of vitamins the drink contains, when it could quite easily be mistaken for an SPF rating. I did, in fact, initially make that mistake.

Ingredient wise, it has all the right things that in theory should help to support sun exposed skin, such as Lutein, Lycopene and Beta Carotene, but with over 30 ingredients, all aiming at different things (UV light absorption, decreasing UV induced inflammation, decreasing DNA damage) I won’t list them all here. UVO is created by an American dermatologist and if you’re curious, the website is fascinating, particularly the clinicals which are done on too small a group to really have teeth, but still.. this is probably part of our future of protecting our skin against the sun so it’s very much worth a read.

I really don’t think I’m ready to take a punt on this yet (4 bottles costs $19.99) – I still need a physical product to put onto my skin, even if it is a transparent mist, to believe that I’m protected, although the website makes it clear UVO is to be used alongside sunscreen.  However, I genuinely think UVO is at the forefront of a trend that over the next few years will blossom and that we could see a time when no physical sunscreen is required as long as we’re chugging down our Futurama drinks.