Banana Boat Sunscreen: Comparisons of Protection for Babies

Technology moves ahead in all things, sunscreen included. When looking at the shelves of sunscreen, it's easy to get overwhelmed by all of the options that you have available. With so many different brands, how do you choose the one that's right for you?

To make it even more confusing, within the brands there are many different options. There are sprays, lotions and sticks. Within a brand, you may see all sorts of different types: Baby, kids, sport, defense. All this assuming you can figure out what SPF you want to use. How does one go about choosing?

One of the more popular brands on the market right now is Banana Boat. Readily available at almost every retail store, it has a proven and well-known name. It also is the brand with perhaps the most number of options. Banana Boat's website breaks the different types down into the following categories: Ultramist, Sport, General Protection, Everyday Protection, Sunless Tanning, Baby and Kids and Outdoor Tanning. As a family with a young child, it is often easiest and cheapest to use the same sunscreen that our child uses, so we have the most experience with the Baby and Kids section.

Within the Baby and Kids subsection, there are four main options. Personally, we have tried the lotion spray, the tear-free lotion and the stick. We have discovered that there are advantages and disadvantages to each, and it is often better to have a couple of different options available for different scenarios.

First, the spray. Banana Boat offers both a clear spray and a lotion spray. We have never used the clear spray, so I will discuss the lotion spray here. Since it is designed for babies, it comes in SPF 50, which is the highest option available for infants (Banana Boat now also offers an "Ultra Defense" SPF 80, but it does not come in "baby"). One of the biggest advantages to the spray is ease of use. For those who have used regular lotions on infants and toddlers, you know how difficult it is to keep a squirming child covered properly. Our daughter has hypersensitive skin, and this spray does not irritate at all. The white lotion offers the ability to see whether your child is fully covered in sunscreen.

The spray is less exact than lotion, since you are spraying it on, and we have found that you still have to rub it into the skin. It really can't be used on a baby's face at all, although it claims to be hypoallergenic and "tear-free." This may be true compared to other lotions, but it still definitely proved to be an irritant for our child when it got into her eyes. We didn't even spray her face: she rubbed her eyes with sunscreen covered hands. It seems like we go through more of this than the lotion, but not because we necessarily like it better. The spray format means that you use a lot more to cover the same ground.

The tear-free lotion by Banana Boat is really our favorite product by them. It's simple to use, and comes in a variety of packages. The simple lotion bottle, which is soft covered and sits on its top so that the lotion comes out easier. As it's white, it's just as easy to see where it is. We have had really good luck with coating our daughter with this sunscreen before putting her bathing suit on, providing an extra layer of protection. We don't go through so much of it, and often have some to spare by the end of summer, even though we seem to use a lot of it. There are also packages available that are quite small and can be clipped into a diaper bag. This version has proved invaluable countless times. Honestly, I cannot think of any disadvantages, outside the fact that the "tear free" part didn't seem to be true for our child in this style, either, so it doesn't work well on her face. We also have to make sure that someone has a firm grip on her so she will sit still for application of this product.

The stick is really the only option for faces. We've tried spraying the spray version into our hands and rubbing it on her face, and we've tried rubbing the lotion version on her face. In both cases, it ended up in her eyes. She didn't cry (I guess that's the "tear-free" part), but her eyes watered and she seemed to be having difficulty. The stick spreads on nicely and easily. It doesn't come in "baby," but is available in a kid's option. I imagine it would not be particularly good for smaller infants. Additionally, it is only available to SPF 30. Although that proved sufficient even for our daughter, who burns easily, we always made sure to apply an extra layer of this. No lotions work well if the child is wet or sweaty, but the stick version seemed to work even less well.