bought this sunscreen when I went home to Venda for a weekend and I realised I had forgotten my sunscreen. I was in a near panic because in Limpopo the sun doesn’t play – it gets as hot as 40deg in the summer. Even the cold water comes out hot in the afternoons! Anyways so I popped into Edgars to look for sunscreen and amongst the choices I saw a small yellow tube with the famous phrase ’8 Hour Cream’ and price sticker of R195 (US$20) and I thought well this is a great find.

What I love about this sunscreen is that it is quite rich and that meant that I could go without moisturiser. I simply put on my serum then followed with the sunscreen; fewer layers in the Limpopo heat was a godsend. I also liked that it has a high Sun Protection Factor(SPF) of 50, which is ideal if you are correcting skin problems. The sunscreen is a light yellow colour with a thick texture. Being quite dark the sunscreen left me with a pasty, whitish look which meant that I had to put on powder if I didn’t want to be mistaken for Casper the Ghost. So the advantage of being able to forgo moisturiser is cancelled out by having to brush on powder to maintain your skin tone. Nevertheless, the product did it job. I spent hours in the sun, duly reapplying the sunscreen every 2/3 hours and I didn’t get a heat rash or breakout or any tanning like I normally would. The downside to this product is that is its colour which is due to the fact that sun protection ingredients like zinc oxide are white but also because it is not designed for African skin. The Casper effect is not the worst I’ve come across but it does lose the product some points.

Nevertheless, its job is to moisturise and protect from the sun and it does that exceedingly well.