A: It may not be widely known that if you take vitamins C and E your skin is less likely to be damaged by the sun. The sun creates free radicals, which wreak havoc on your cells and set you up for diseases like skin cancer. Vitamins help offset these free radicals. In just 30 to 45 minutes the sun depletes 80% of our vitamin stores. I tell my patients to take 500 mg of vitamin C, 400 IU of vitamin E, 100 mg of alpha lipoic acid and 30 mg of coenzyme Q10 (all are available at health-food and vitamin stores). In addition, I tell them to put on antioxidant cream. There's plenty of evidence that if you take vitamins orally, they still get depleted in the sun. When you apply a topical, you get a 100 times higher level of the vitamin and it won't get depleted. But even this protection doesn't give you a ticket, for example, to sit out in the sun.