Article

Skin protection against UV radiation using thin films of cerium oxide

¹ Instituto de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Cuernavaca, Morelos 62210, Mexico
² Instituto de Geofísica, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Coyoacán, Ciudad de México 04510, Mexico
³ Corrosión y Protección (CyP), Ciudad de México, Mexico

^* Corresponding author: eortiz@icf.unam.mx

Received: 30 August 2018
Accepted: 24 January 2019

Abstract

In this work, we evaluated the efficiency of cerium oxide as sunscreen using titanium oxide as standard comparison material. Geant4 software was used to perform numerical simulation, we calculated the radiation dose that ultraviolet radiation deposits in a skin sample as a function of thin film thickness of the sunscreens. We found that in the interval between 5 and 15 nm of the thin film thickness and for wavelengths between 160 and 400 nm, cerium oxide has the potential to reduce the radiation dose more than 10% with respect to the same thickness band of titanium oxide. Using thin films of cerium oxide and titanium oxide with same thicknesses and greater than 45 nm, the difference in the attenuation of the radiation dose for both materials is less than 1%. The results lead us to propose cerium oxide as an alternative material to titanium oxide for the manufacture of sunscreens.