You don't have to specifically go out in the sun without sunscreen to get vitamin D, says New York dermatologist and skin cancer specialist Dendy Engelman, M.D. "You can get all the required levels of vitamin D through oral supplementation and incidental sunlight," she says. She's talking about the parts of your body that aren't generally slathered in sunscreen when you're out walking the dog, such as your hands or scalp.

Besides, if you really want to get your D the old-fashioned way, there are healthier ways to do it than risking skin cancer and wrinkles. Think salmon, tuna, eggs, and fortified milk and cereal.

The vitamin D theory as an excuse for going sunscreen-free especially ticks your derm off when you're doing it at a tanning salon, which gives fake-bakers a strong dose of UVA rays. Engelman says that these rays are much more damaging and dangerous than natural sunlight's UVB rays. "UVA rays penetrate deeply, degrade collagen and cause cancer," says Engelman.

Dendy says that your Italian, African or Hispanic ancestry does not exempt you from skin cancer. While dark skin contains more innate protection than light skin (it has a natural SPF of about 13.4, compared to light skin's 3.4), Engelman says that this often means her more pigmented patients are not as diligent about sun protection and visiting a dermatologist for full body checks. "They wait until something is bleeding or growing," says Engelman.

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Engelman says a good rule of thumb for anyone, light or dark, is to get a full body check once a year. "If you have no family history, you're not outside, and you have dark skin, you could maybe go every one and a half to two years," she says. "But really everyone should go every 12 to 18 months."

"I hear this all the time," says New York dermatologist Debra Jaliman, M.D., author of "Skin Rules." Proponents of the sunscreen-cancer link say that oxybenzone, an active ingredient in chemical sunscreens, creates free radicals, which, in theory, cause melanoma.

Engelman and Jaliman both say there isn't proof that sunscreen causes cancer; on the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that sun protection prevents it.

If certain ingredients make you wary, Engelman recommends physical sunscreen over chemical sunscreen. Physical sunscreen, containing ingredients like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, forms a layer of protection over your skin to block sunlight, whereas chemical sunscreen sinks into your skin and absorbs UV light. "There is nothing more organic than zinc and titanium," points out Engelman. "They're on the periodic table."

"Patients think [skin care] products are magic potions," says board-certified dermatologist Jessica Krant, M.D. and founder of Art of Dermatology. "They use something for a week, but stop because they think it's not doing anything." Krant says good products take months (or more) to produce results that might not even be visible to the naked eye.

"Some work so subtly that they really only slow aging, so to you it seems like nothing is happening. You'd only be able to tell [the difference] if you could look at yourself 10 years in the future: One version of you having used the product, and one not."

And by "something," patients usually mean 10 different suspicious spots on their body, says Engelman. Often, patients don't want to do a full body check because they're embarrassed to undress or don't have time, but a single spot check is not even effective for the one funny-looking mole you're pointing out, Engelman stresses. "I need to be able to assess every mole and take into consideration the kind of moles a body produces." She says that a single mole might look normal at first glance, but if it looks nothing like the other moles on your body, it might be a problem.

Plus, unless you're a seriously bendy gymnast, you simply can't see areas of your body like the upper back or the backs of the knees -- and even if you are, you might not recognize what you see as dangerous. "The cancerous moles are never the ones patients point out to me," says Jaliman. "It's always something they didn't think looked bad, or couldn't see."