Sun cream allergens and privacy policy
I’m just back spending a couple of weeks at the beach with my family. The sun was hitting hard, most of the time, and with our light skin not so used to the sun, thanks to the foggy weather of central Switzerland, we must protect our self from sun burn. My wife is doing the family shopping and she got this new habit to scan every food and skincare products with the app Yuka. This app connect you to a database listing several millions of products and for each product calculate a score based on the healthy and non-healthy properties of the product. The company claim to be independent, not exploiting user data or reselling them and is making money our of a premium version which is based on an open price offer starting at a reasonable 10€ per year without commitment.
For skincare products the score is mainly related to the number of allergens or potentially cancer-causing agent and after using the app for some time she figured out two things. Firstly, the shiniest and most expensive brands doesn’t get the better score, even some economical options products get a good result, thus we tried some dirt cheap 2€ for huge 3L bottle of body wash and it got a score of 0 out of 100, the absolute worst possible. Secondly, it’s super hard to get a good sun cream, top score barely pass above 60/100, usually the index 50 for babies are the less worst, hopefully.
This little story make me realize that, even if we might have different area of interest and sometimes opinions, we both do some effort to do each day a little bit more the right thing according to our possibilities and interests, she, by selecting and thus endorsing products that are healthier and more respectful for the environment, while I’m using products and services that respects privacy, give more control and transparency to the user and are more durable thanks to a good conception and repairability.
Thanks to her I’m also improving my consumer and user behavior in other areas than internet services, software and hardware, and she is too, little by little, improving her digital habits when she can. The growing awareness of more and more people in many areas that are new or newly accessible thanks to the new possibilities offered by technologies, will allow all of us to improve our daily life. Whenever you want and can, use Nostr over Twitter, PeerTube over YouTube, Protonmail over Gmail, bike over car, … it will help everyone going together with a more open, more respectful world. Leave in the comments what little thing you are doing to improve your daily life.
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