When you walk into Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacies you are immediately confronted by the cosmetics counter, where the staff are obviously instructed to greet you warmly. I always say hello, and then make my way into the heart of the store for whatever I’m looking for, never having had cause to stop.

Last week, though, I did stop, to ask the clerk where the sunscreen was.

“Well, the high-end sunscreen is over here,” she said, pointing to a posh looking display nearby, “and everything else is on the other side of the store.”

High-end sunscreen? I had no idea there was such a thing.

More often than not, I am ashamed to say, I am a sunscreen aspirant rather than a sunscreen wearer. I’ve always found applying sunscreen to be akin to spreading a heady mashup of motor oil, molasses, and printers ink to my body, and walking around thus-protected has always proved rather uncomfortable.

Perhaps I’ve been shopping in the wrong aisle, I wondered.

So I walked over to the high-end sunscreen display, where I found suitably high-end brands with names like La Roche and Darphin and Shiseido. 

I settled on a tube of High Protection Spray SPF 50+ from Avène. At $33 for 200 ml, it was roughly 5x more than I’d ever paid for sunscreen.

I’m only a week—several applications—into using it, but I must say that the motor-oil-molasses factor is, indeed, significantly less than what I’ve experienced in “low-end” commodity sunscreen. 

Whether it will be $33 better, I’ll have to hold on to determine. But I am becoming a regular sunscreen user, so signs are good.

(“That’s right, all the fanciest Dijon Ketchup” is a line from If I Had a $1,000,000 from Barenaked Ladies’ 1992 album Gordon).