A mother from Ferring, West Sussex, is campaigning to make sun cream cheaper for everyone in the UK after her pimple turned out to be skin cancer. Jessica Zbinden-Webster, 35, was diagnosed with skin cancer in her 20s and believes her condition was caused by several sunburns she received as a child. Now a mother to two-year-old Arabella, she wants to protect all children by making UV protection more accessible.
Campaign motivated by daughter
Zbinden-Webster said: "Having a child is one of my main motivators for this campaign. I feel strongly that protecting her vulnerable skin is not something that should be taxed. I feel very flattered that I get to carry the torch on this issue, and I will see it through one way or another."
In 2018, she found what she thought was a spot under her right eye. Acne was not uncommon for her, so she didn't think much of it, but one morning she scratched the lump lightly and it started to bleed, which raised alarm bells.
Diagnosis and surgery
She visited her GP the next day and received the news that the spot was skin cancer. She said: "I was incredibly shocked. The last thing that I ever thought it would be is skin cancer. I thought that skin cancer was all to do with moles, but now I know that it can be any skin lesion that is new, changing, or unusual. I also thought that skin cancer was an older person's disease. I thought it happened to septuagenarians who sunbathed religiously over many decades. I didn't expect it to happen to someone like me."
The cancer was an infiltrative basal cell carcinoma, where malignant cells grow as thin, irregular strands that extend deeply into surrounding tissue. Zbinden-Webster had Mohs surgery to remove the tumour along with most of her lower eyelid, performed under local anaesthetic while she was awake. A skin graft from her arm was used to cover the large hole that couldn't be closed with stitches. Over the following four years, she had several laser surgeries on the area to make the skin look and act more like eye skin, but it was a hit to her self-esteem.
She added: "Despite looking fairly innocuous on the surface, underneath my skin, the cancer cells were growing outward and downward like the roots of the tree. The cancer had spread pretty far, and I had to have most of my lower eyelid removed. It was an uncomfortable recovery period, both physically and emotionally. Being a woman in your mid-20s is a time when you are hyper-aware of your appearance by default. Leaving the house with a huge scar and a healing skin graft did make me incredibly self-conscious, and I did attract quite a few stares of the wrong kind."
Petition to scrap VAT
The surgery was successful at removing the cancer, and she has had no issues since. Due to the young age at which she was diagnosed, dermatologists suggested the damage was caused when she was a child. She accepts that "just one blistering sunburn in childhood" can actually double your chances of developing skin cancer later in life.
Zbinden-Webster started a petition on Change.org for the tax on sun cream, which is currently classified as cosmetic and subject to 20% VAT, to be scrapped. The petition has received over 100,000 signatures and will be delivered to 10 Downing Street. She said: "I researched the policy in the UK relating to the disease and I was shocked to find an enormous shortcoming in skin cancer policy around accessibility to sunscreen. This tax on sunscreen, especially for babies and children, is just unethical."
