Is Your Smart Phone Aging Your Skin?

Not only do we need to protect our skin from the sun’s harmful UV rays, we now need to be concerned with the damaging light emanating from our smartphones and computer screens.  It’s aging our skins!

Blue light from mobile phone or any electronic devices damages your eyes, but recent studies have shown that it also damages your skin. This is because the radiation from blue light penetrates all the way down to the bottom of the 2nd layer of your skin (the dermis), which is actually going much deeper than UVA and UVB rays.

Let’s discuss the kinds of light that can age your skin in general. UVB is one of the UV rays from the sun that damages your skin. Think of UVB as “UV-Burning,” because it’s the type of light that causes sunburn. UVB burns your skin because it penetrates the first layer of your skin, the epidermis. UVA is another type of radiation from the sun. Think of UVA as “UV-Aging,” because it produces wrinkles, age spots, sagging, and all that skin harm, including skin cancer. This is the light that penetrates thru to the top of the dermis. As you can see, UV-Aging is much more harmful to your skin than UV-Burning.

Now, let’s delve into why blue light ages your skin. UV-Burning goes to the 1st layer and UV-Aging goes to upper level of the 2nd layer, but more dangerously, blue light goes even much deeper into the 2nd layer, which means that it damages the skin’s collagen, hyaluronic acid and elastin.

So, blue light is more harmful than UVB and UVA. By the way, blue light is also generated by the sun too! No wonder, the sky is blue. As research on blue light damage is relatively new, most sunscreens have not been tested for blue light. As you can imagine,  Japanese companies have begun testing their sunscreens with blue light. We hope to soon see blue light tested certification by the FDA, added to “SPF” for UV-Burning and “Broad Spectrum” for UV-Aging.

So what’s the solution in the meantime? To combat blue light from the sun, wear physical protection outside as much as possible. In fact, in Japan it’s very popular to wear blue light shield glasses in offices to protect eyes from the computer.

Here are some tips to prevent blue light from screens.

For phones:

• Dim the screen light
• Cover the screen with a blue light filter or find blue light filter app

For laptop or desktop:

You can actually change the graphic settings to reduce the amount of blue. Learn how.