Babies have remarkably beautiful, smooth, soft skin. It’s also far more delicate than adult skin.

Why? For one, neonatal skin is one-fifth the thickness of adult skin. The thickness of skin grows proportionally with age, reaching maximum thickness at around age 20. The thin barrier makes it harder for babies to retain moisture in their skin, and to keep bad stuff out.

Not only is it thinner, babies’ skin architecture is also less tightly packed, making the barrier function even less effective. Plus, sebum production stops very early and does not re-start until puberty. Sebum has important anti-microbial properties…without it, the skin’s ability to handle foreign agents, irritating substances, and toxins is compromised. All of this helps explain why babies are prone to dry skin, rashes, sensitivity, permeability and infection.

Babies can react to all sorts of mildly irritating topically applied ingredients that would never bother an adult, and are vulnerable to external contaminants and synthetics in many personal care products. Sana is designed to support the skin’s natural barrier naturally. That means providing heavily nourishing products containing light lipids and waxes to help keep moisture in and bad stuff out.

The goal is to help the situation, not worsen it – so Sana also avoids things found in many personal care products, including common irritants or synthetics, known as endocrine disrupters, toxins or carcinogens.

One of my dear friends received his sunscreen recently and called me: “What’s with this dented aluminum tube? Plastic tubes would be so much sleeker!”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “It hasn’t been tampered with; these packaging irregularities are totally normal for the material we chose to use.”

Yes, plastic does look pretty and doesn’t dent, but when debating between plastic tubes and aluminum ones it became clear that the benefits of sturdy, dent-free plastic did not outweigh the material’s tremendous costs to the environment.

I explained the pitfalls of plastic to my friend. “Aluminum is easily recycled into new, recyclable products!”

He still had questions.

“What about getting plastic from China? and every country in the world uses plastic, so who cares if you use a few plastic tubes?”

I told him that the energy costs of shipping plastics overseas from China are huge.

As for “every country in the world” using plastic, well, let’s take another look at that: China has already banned plastic bags, and- oh yeah- cities in our own country have, too!

We believe we’re doing the earth a favor with our decision. So when your aluminum tubes of sunscreen arrive, consider the natural variations in texture as just another beautiful element of one of earth’s most recyclable materials.