Project: https://a-day-at-the-beach.onrender.com/

Github Repo: https://github.com/elizabethengelman/a-day-at-the-beach

Presentation slide dec: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1g5CJUgKx24gUuOplheeChtIGNo9kTbag8haEc0nEIiM/edit#slide=id.g1ac9d23add7_0_77

Research from Critical Experiences Blog: Sunscreen Project Development

Concept & Motivation

This project came from my Critical Experiences final, and my initial idea was to explore sunscreen with the expectation that I could answer some questions I had about how sunscreen works, and generally that I would continue to be very pro-sunscreen. I even hoped that I could create a compelling argument to convince the people in my life who don’t wear sunscreen to reconsider.

I began imagining what sunscreen may look like in the future and considered a world where people wear colorful sunscreen not only to protect their skin but as a fashion statement. As I was imagining this future, I decided to do some research into the past to understand where sunscreen came from.

I was surprised to find out that sunscreen isn’t such a cut-and-dry topic and that the systems that sunscreen affects are far more varied than I had realized. This is when I realized how steeped in colonialism sunscreen is, and how much my own experiences have shaped my viewpoint about sunscreen.

My idea to create sunscreens that were fun colors that people could wear as a fashion statement felt new and innovative to me until I learned that there are cultures in Southeast Asia that have been doing this for centuries - using yellow or white pastes for cosmetics and sun protection purposes.

I learned that colonialism is really at the heart of a lot of what I know about sunscreen:

• Historically: Wikipedia says that an Australian chemist, H.A. Milton Blake, invented sunscreen in 1932, yet contradictorily the article then later goes on to describe how sun protection has been used by civilizations for thousands of years.
• Clinical research: People of color are missing from a lot of sunscreen efficacy research. In addition, there are also scientists who are questioning how dangerous UV rays are to people who have more melanin in their skin. Since there is little to no research on this topic, it’s hard to understand how dermatologists can recommend people of color put potentially harmful chemicals on their skin so readily without more information.
• Product development: Sunscreens on the market specifically developed for people of color are relatively new.
• Product usage: I found several accounts of people whose primary use of sunscreen is to keep their skin from getting darker, rather than being specifically worried about skin damage. The main motivation for sunscreen use was to keep skin lighter, presumably a product of white-focused beauty standards.

My hope was to create a project to allow my audience an opportunity to “experience life in someone else’s skin”, while also hoping to expose and educate about how colonialism affects sunscreen research, how we talk about the history of it, and how products are marketed and developed.

Technical Considerations

• Deploy to Render instead of Glitch: At some point, I decided to deploy my project using Render instead of Glitch. One of the big reasons was that because I also used this project concept for my Critical Experiences final, I wanted a way to deploy different commits so that I could see the progress I made between the two projects. I wasn’t able to find an easy way to do that, so I went with Render instead, which I’ve used before.
• Using Tailwind for css styling: I’ve been using Tailwind for adding styles to my current project at work, and have enjoyed using it, so I decided to use Tailwind for this project as well to continue to get comfortable with it.
• Express App instead of React: I originally thought that I would create a React app so that I could more easily create a single-page app. I had gotten my p5js sketch to work using the web editor: first attempt, second attempt, but then when I tried to get it to work with React, I ran into some complications and couldn’t get it to work as expected, though I can’t remember now what the issue was! However I decided to go back to using Express because I knew that I could get p5js working there. I suspect that perhaps the p5 React library I was using may have had a bug, or perhaps I wasn’t using it correctly.
• ML5: Once we learned about the ml5.js library in class, I got really into the idea of experimenting with it, specifically the ability to create a mask with a video. This was something we hoped to do for the yearbook project that Dora and I made and didn’t quite get that done. So getting the chance to explore that a bit more seemed fun. As I was thinking about ml5 and my sunscreen project, I kind of like the idea of talking about colonialism, and skin color by allowing a user to look at their own face in this context rather than using just an image or video that represents only one skin color. There’s also a lot of bias in machine learning, which would be really interesting to explore in the future as well, but I didn’t quite get there with this project.