We are having a very early summer here in London – on Thursday it reached 25ºC! It’s all a bit of a surprise, and I can imagine that there will be a lot of burnt people turning up to work on Monday morning! Please don’t be one of them – it’s totally unnecessary in these days of SPF-mania! If you have a little root through your beauty products, I’ll bet you’ll find loads of creams and lotions that have an SPF. Foundations with an SPF aren’t ideal as you’ll rarely put enough of a layer on to get the full protection stated, but it all helps!

Action plan for first thing this morning is to gather up all your products with an SPF. (I have done this already and put them in the bathroom cabinet – even if the sun only lasts for a few days I’ll be prepared for when summer comes properly!) Take stock of what you’ve got: are they all makeup products? Or are they all last year’s holiday suntan lotions? Throw out any manky old bottles of lotion that have been taken on holiday for the last five years running – you don’t need the dregs of that Piz Buin tanning oil, or the split tube of SPF50 with added glitter!

There’s plenty of time to stock up on suntan lotion before summer arrives properly, but for now, it’s important to have adequate protection on our faces – it might only be early April but the sun was scorching this week! Sometimes it can be really confusing trying to work out whether you need a proper suntan lotion for your face, a primer with inbuilt protection or just a moisturiser with an SPF. Perhaps you want a product that’s makeup, moisturiser and an SPF in one! Below I have listed just a few of my favourite sun protection products that are perfect for this time of year.

Clarins Sun Wrinkle Control Eye Contour Cream High Protection SPF 30, £17 from Boots.com. I have used this eye cream for years. Not for an ‘everyday’ cream, but if I know that I’m going to be exposed to the sun properly I’ll make sure that I have it on. It’s a higher factor than most standard eye creams that you can buy and I find that reassuring! I like the smell of it and find the texture light and unobtrusive.

Laboratoire Remede UV Coat, £30.70 from the Bliss Website. This stuff is amazing. After shaking it (and shaking it again) you dispense a small amount of super-lightweight fluid and apply it all over your face. There’s a tinted version (I use the medium to warm my skin up a bit!) but also an untinted formula. The coverage is pretty sheer, as you’d expect, but leaves skin looking softened and more even. It’s an oil-free formula and it provides an SPF of 30. All in this tiny bottle!

Clinique Targeted Protection Stick SPF 45 (also in SPF 35), £15.50 from Boots.com. Perfect to keep in your handbag and bring out for those times when you decide to have lunch outside or go for a drink after work and sit in the full glare of the evening sun! This is perfect for applying to your nose so that you don’t get a huge mark where your sunglasses have been! It’s also mess-free so easy to apply to your neck or chest or tops of ears whenever you find yourself unexpectedly al fresco!

Dermalogica Solar Defense Booster, RRP £29.50 or £22.13 delivered from here: lookfantastic.com. Another one that I have been using for years, this is a clever little SPF that mixes into any of your moisturisers. For the full SPF 30 you can apply it directly, but you can also ‘zone’ your face so that you apply ‘neat’ SPF 30 to your nose and cheekbones and lips, and a slightly diluted SPF with your moisturiser to the rest of your face. I always like to apply extra SPF to my nose so that I don’t get that Rudolph effect that is so unbecoming in a lady!

Becca Mineral SPF Primer, £34 from Zuneta . Great under makeup to keep your look dewy and fresh, this SPF has been tested to Australian standards which are apparently far more stringent than EU safety tests. This is proper, high protection suncare but in a very sophisticated makeup primer! It does both jobs exceedingly well which is sometimes not the case with these multi-purpose products!

These are just some of the products that I use regularly – there are plenty of sun lotions designed especially for your face that are available in Boots or in your local supermarket. There’s really no excuse not to be protected – there are creams in every price range from budget to utterly luxurious. It doesn’t matter which one you use so long as you use it!