Sunscreen is my love language
I write about sunscreen—a lot. My friends know this. My family knows this. And yet, without fail, every male member of my family still walks out the door bare-faced into the Philippine sun like it isn’t actively trying to burn them. I’ve accepted that I cannot force anyone. What I can do is keep talking about every sunscreen that has genuinely worked for me, in the hope that one day, one of them glances at something I’ve written and thinks, ‘fine, maybe I’ll try it.’
Until then, I will continue to be the person with sunscreen in every bag she owns. And I own many bags, which means I also own many sunscreens, scattered across my house like a very specific kind of hoarding.
This summer has made the obsession feel a little more justified. The heat in Manila right now is not the heat I grew up with. It’s faster and more aggressive, the kind that makes your skin react within minutes of stepping outside. I’ve been more deliberate about what I put on my face because of it, and somewhere in that process, I also ended up with a compact from Vienna and a pair of inhalers that smell like a café, which tells you something about the shape of my days.
Sunwear—because the sun here means business
I’ve never been a one-sunscreen person, and I doubt I ever will be. I rotate, I experiment, I get curious about new formulations. But some products earn a permanent place in the rotation, and the Sunwear collection by Vice Cosmetics has done exactly that.
What drew me to it first was the format. For a country where the heat makes thick, heavy sunscreen genuinely unpleasant to wear, Sunwear understood the assignment. The Daily Shield Sun Stick is what I put on every morning before I leave the house. It’s SPF 50+ PA++++ and it applies as a smooth, blurring stick that gives the skin a soft-focus finish rather than a greasy film. It has centella asiatica extract, a plant-derived ingredient well known for its calming, anti-inflammatory properties, and ginger root extract, which helps protect against the redness and irritation that UV exposure triggers.
Then there are the two mists, which are the products I find myself thinking about most. The Mini Skin Rescue Calming Mist is built around hypochlorous acid, a compound that mimics one of the body’s own natural antimicrobial responses. It’s gentle, it reduces redness and irritation efficiently, and it works quickly on skin that’s already been stressed by heat and sun. Paired with aloe leaf extract and panthenol, which protect the moisture barrier and help restore elasticity, it’s what I reach for by midday when my skin has been through something and needs to calm down.
The Mini Hydra Bounce Cream Essence Mist does something different. It has hyaluronic acid complexes and plant-derived polysaccharides, both of which attract and retain water in the skin. The polysaccharides specifically create a kind of moisture-holding mesh on the surface that keeps the hydration where you put it, rather than letting it evaporate immediately in the heat. It lands on the skin like a proper cream but as a mist.
And because we collectively forget that lips absorb sun damage, too, there’s the Fresh Dew Lip Balm with SPF 30 PA++++. It has mango butter for antioxidant-rich moisture retention, hyaluronic acid to keep lips plump, and peptides that support collagen to maintain suppleness over time. It comes in sheer tinted shades, and I’ve been wearing Petal, a fresh mulberry tone, which photographs beautifully on morenas and requires exactly zero effort to look intentional.
The compact from Vienna
My aunt came back from a trip to Austria and handed me a compact from Look by Bipa, the in-house beauty brand of Bipa, which is essentially Austria’s Watsons. The product was the Miracle Shine Eraser, a gel-to-powder formula, and she picked it because she thought I’d find it interesting.
She was right, and it has since become one of my most-used products, which I did not expect from a drugstore compact I’d never heard of.
It looks like a clear gel in the pan. The moment it touches your skin, it converts into a completely weightless powder. No white cast, no caking, nothing disrupting the makeup underneath. Just a soft-focus, matte finish that reads as polished skin rather than product.
The reason it works is worth explaining. The formula is built on polymethylsilsesquioxane, dimethicone, and silica.
Polymethylsilsesquioxane is a spherical silicone particle that diffuses light, so pores and texture appear smoother optically. It’s why there’s no flashback in photos. Dimethicone is what gives the formula its initial gel texture and forms a fine, breathable film on the skin that controls oil without dehydrating anything. And silica is the workhorse that physically absorbs the sebum.
Together, these three ingredients address shine at the source rather than just sitting over it, which is why it doesn’t look powdery even when you’ve applied a real amount. It’s free of alcohol, talc, fragrance, oil, parabens, and microplastics, which matters for reactive skin because oil-control products that strip or irritate only cause the skin to produce more oil in response. This one doesn’t trigger that cycle.
Here’s the thing, though: You don’t have to wait for a family trip to Austria to get something that works the same way. The Clocheflame Dream Filter, a local Filipino brand available online, runs on the exact same core actives. Its ingredient list includes polymethylsilsesquioxane, dimethicone, and silica, the same trio doing the same job.
It’s mineral-based, talc-free, fragrance-free, and paraben-free. The finish is soft-focus and never fully matte, which means it doesn’t flatten the skin or look like a product on the face. If anything, it skews slightly more radiant than the Bipa compact, which suits Philippine skin tones well. The two are not identical, but they are operating on the same logic.
The inhalers that live in my other bag
Pastel Philippines released limited-edition Coffee and Cacao inhalers, and they are exactly as delightful as they sound. The brand’s signature 2-in-1 inhaler design is already familiar to a lot of Filipinos. What these new variants do is take that same format and load it with coffee and chocolate scents for a quick sensory reset when you need one.
Inhalers work through direct inhalation of aromatic compounds that interact with the olfactory system, which has a faster, more immediate pathway to the brain’s limbic system than almost any other sense. The limbic system governs mood, memory, and stress response, which is why a scent can shift your state within seconds in a way that no amount of deep breathing alone quite manages.
Coffee and cacao aromatics are associated with alertness and comfort, two things that a long afternoon in Manila often requires simultaneously. These aren’t therapeutic-grade aromatherapy claims, just the honest, well-documented relationship between scent and how quickly the mind recalibrates. I’ve had mine out in a meeting and been asked about it at least three times. That, too, is a form of endorsement.
The point of all of it
My male family members still leave the house without sunscreen. I have not given up. What I have done is build a routine that works for me and talk about it loudly enough that maybe, eventually, someone in my orbit will be convinced.
In the meantime, there is a Sunwear sun stick in my black bag, a calming mist in the one I use for events, a compact in the small bag I carry when I want to feel like a person who has it together, and a Pastel inhaler in the pocket of most things I own.
This is not excess. This is preparedness. There’s a difference, and I stand by it.
