As far as accessories go, Sunbella has you covered this summer with its sun parasols and sun wraps, making sure you still look stylish while being sun safe.
Jillian Intini, a registered nurse with 35 years experience in skin cancer, created Sunbella after a conversation with one of her skin cancer patients about hat hair.
“Whilst chatting with this particular patient in the postoperative recovery room, the lady divulged to me that she had spent her entire life outdoors and she despised wearing hats because they gave her hat hair,” she says.
“She told me how she wore only a visor to avoid squashing her hair.”
Intini says she loves the outdoor lifestyle but, up until this point, sun protection was always an afterthought in her daily routine.
“If I wore sunscreen under my makeup, I couldn’t reapply it like I should. If I wore a hat, it was a small visor that wouldn’t give me hat hair. If I was out fishing I would wear my long sleeve fishing shirt, but if I was going out for coffee with friends I had nothing appropriate to cover my arms.
“All existing sun protection options were hot, uncomfortable, impractical or unattractive. I needed an elegant, effective and easy option. Inspired by my patient’s words and keen to avoid the harrowing results that I was treating, I decided to purchase a sun umbrella and use it whenever possible.”
Unfortunately it was much more difficult to find what she was looking for and the umbrellas she did find were ineffective or ostentatious. So she decided to create one herself.
“I bought a couple of old rain umbrellas from the local swap-meet and dismantled and reassembled them, hand-sewed a canopy using curtain blockout fabric from Spotlight and had a handle turned from wood by a lovely gentleman at the Mens Shed. I straightened the spokes so it looked more elegant and added a frilly wind-vent to help it cope in the summer sea breeze. The result was an elegant and effective sun parasol.”
This was the beginning of Sunbella, which officially launched in 2012. Since its debut it has won several awards and won a legion of fans including royalty and celebrities, all looking to ensure that they are protecting their skin in the most stylish and safest way possible.
“Our motivation hasn’t changed but our business has certainly evolved. We’ve created new ranges of sun parasols in response to customer feedback and broadened our stylish sun protection offerings to include sun gloves and sunstyle wraps (versatile summer scarves that can be worn 10 different ways to protect your upper body),” Intini says.
