It’s Father’s Day! My dad and I aren’t the kind of people who can just shoot the breeze over the phone. When we can’t be together in the same place, it’s often hard to get him to keep talking to me unless we have a specific reason to talk. So I’m grateful that this blog has given us a new way to connect and share ideas, and for me to learn more about what he did for many years before he retired.

The American in me is primed to feel like anything instantly gets glammed up once you slap a French name on it. “Escargot” sounds way more appealing than “snails,” and “merci” seems more refined than “thanks.” So it should probably come as no surprise that I always think of La Roche-Posay as a premium brand, even though it’s widely available in drugstores, and not terribly expensive.

Lately I’ve noticed that some products advertise SPF protection, but only contain one active ingredient: titanium dioxide. Why is that a problem? Because titanium dioxide only protects against part of the UV spectrum—specifically, UVB and UVA2 rays. It does not protect your skin from UVA1 (340–400 nm) rays, according to this table from the Skin Cancer Foundation.