Photoprotection by clothing

The increasing use and importance of clothing for sun protection for children is now a key element in a range of protection strategies, where reducing ultraviolet radiation (UVR) exposures in early life is fundamental to skin cancer prevention programmes. Other applications of photoprotection by clothing are sun protection of outdoor workers in occupational situations, sun protection of the general population in recreational situations, protection of photosensitive patients and protection of workers exposed to intense artificial sources of UVR such as welding. The broadest application and the one that this article will mainly concentrate on is clothing and sun protection, although there will be some discussion on the other areas. Before 1990, there were very few references in the scientific literature on clothing and UVR protection (1–10) and many of these were to do with clothing and transmission of UVR from artificial sources. However, this situation has changed dramatically over the last 10 years, where there has been a surge of interest, with numerous publications dealing with the factors that affect the UVR protection provided by fabrics and garments. This in turn has lead to the rating of the sun protection provided by clothing, the development of lightweight, comfortable clothing that is highly UVR protective as well as other advances such as wash and wear treatments to increase the UVR protection of existing clothing. A comprehensive and detailed summary of much of the work on clothing and UVR is in the recently released report of the Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage (CIE) or International Commission on Illumination Technical Committee 6–29 entitled ‘UV Protection and Clothing’ CIE 172:2006 (11).