Balance Sun Exposure & Put Skin First with Eucerin {Giveaway}

Eucerin is on a mission to make people think about their skin and take care of this important organ year round.  With the Eucerin Daily Skin line you can maintain skin health instead of simply solve an issue. When your skin is healthy it is beautiful and confidence is sure to follow.  With that mission in mind, here is this month’s Eurcerin Amassador message regarding the importance of balance sun exposure!

While basking in the sun can feel replenishing and bring us a sense of both mental and physical renewal, the amount of vitamin D our bodies need on a daily basis can absorbed in just the first 15 minutes of our exposure to the sun. Understanding the factors affecting our skin’s reaction to the sun can help us plan our time in the sun.

FACTOR #1 – SUNLIGHT

The strength of sunlight is the main factor for the quantity of UV radiation your skin can be exposed to. Latitude, altitude, time of day, season and cloud coverage can all have a dramatic effect on the sun’s impact on our skin. Even reflected sunlight from windows, pavement, water, snow and sand can raise the risk of overexposure.

FACTOR #2 – SKIN COLOR.

As skin color is determined by the amount of melanin present in the skin, ethnicity can also play a large role in sun exposure. Often a result of a group’s distance from the equator (and its stronger sunlight), darker skins are more resistant to the effects of sunlight than fairer skins. African-Americans, for example, are 20 times less likely to develop melanoma than those with white skin. Conversely, one study found that African-American women aged 15 to 49 have more than 20 times the risk of vitamin D deficiency than Caucasians. Different skin colors will react to UV rays at different speeds. So one should be mindful of her skin’s susceptibilities when considering her exposure time or adding protection.

FACTOR #3 – SUNSCREEN.

The strength of sunscreen is determined by its Sun Protection Factor (SPF), a number that measures the amount of UV radiation required to sunburn with the sunscreen on, relative to the amount that would burn skin without it. For example, SPF-15 allows about 1/15 (about 6%) of the UV rays that would penetrate the skin without the sunscreen on. SPF-30 would allow 1/30 (about 3%) and so on.

The Eucerin Skin First campaign focuses on taking a pledge to protect our skin and keep it healthy, to make skincare a priority and to treat skincare more like health care.  I encourage you to stop by the Skin First website, take the pledge and learn more!

After spending a week in the scorching heat of Texas while visiting family, it became even more obvious why protecting our skin is important. With a long day at Sea World in the water park it became obvious that our skin protection at a whopping 90 SPF still wasn’t enough to protect all of us. Thankfully my kids held up well with just a bit of color but I was kicking myself for being so foolish.  While making sure they were well covered I forgot a few parts of myself and paid the price.  I certainly felt the affects on my chest where I burned this sensitive skin badly. We also should have been reapplying often but we got caught up in moving from one thing to the next and accessing the locker holding our sunblock was not convenient. Someone slap my hand, would you?

To help you with balancing sun exposure, I would like to introduce you to Eucerin Everyday Protection Lotion 15 & 30; Face & Body which I have been enjoying these past few weeks.  These products make it easy to keep yourself protected at all times without the typical sunscreen smell and as part of a daily moisturizing routine!

For this month,  I have a fun skin care giveaway to help you balance your sun exposure this summer! And if you stop by and take the pledge at the Eucerin Facebook page on the SkinFirst tab you will receive complimentary product, while supplies last!

{ Giveaway }

I have a Eucerin Gift Bag for one of my lucky readers which includes a $50 gift certificate to Sunglass Hut and Eucerin Everyday Protection Lotion in SPF 15 and SPF 30.

MAIN ENTRY: Take the pledge to put the health of your skin FIRST. (If you have already done this, just tell me below!)

Want more entries? (You should!) After answering my question do any of the following and leave a comment telling me what you did. Each is worth one entry unless otherwise noted. Your comment is your entry so please leave the appropriate number of comments for each extra entry.

-Watch a Eucerin video in my upper right sidebar & tell me something you found interesting (2 entries)
-Like Eucerin on Facebook
-Leave a comment on their Facebook wall with a link to this contest & how you feel about skincare
-Follow Eucerin on twitter
-Like Baby Loving Mama on Facebook
-Follow Baby Loving Mama publicly
-Subscribe to my feed in a reader or by email
-Follow BLM on twitter and tweet about this giveaway (You can do this daily!)

Win a Eucerin Gift Bag w/ $50 Sunglass Hut GC & lotion with SPF from @EucerinUS @babylovingmama http://bit.ly/chfK0B  #giveaway #skinfirst

-Add my button to your blog
-Blog about this contest (must be at least 50 words) with a link back here and to Eucerin Skin First (3 entries)

This contest will end on 9/8/10 at 11:59 pm CST. U.S. residents only. The winner will be drawn via random.org and will have 72 hours to respond to winning notification email before I draw another winner or do a live giveaway.

Disclosure: I received this same Eucerin gift bag for sharing this with my readers. The opinions and experiences I’ve shared with these products are my own and yours may differ.