University of New South Wales researchers have found Australian consumers are paying extra for mineral sunscreen, believed to be more 'natural' and 'gentle' than traditional sunscreens, but are getting products almost identical to the generic kind. Jon Beves is a chemistry professor at the University of New South Wales.
00:00Yeah, so we looked at a bunch of common sunscreens that you can buy from a supermarket or a regular shop, and we looked at how they absorb UV light and how that is used for protecting you against the sun, essentially.
00:15And what we found was, of course, all the sunscreens that we tested were fantastic. They have great SPF factors and will definitely protect you. And we looked at the different ingredients that were in there to see if we could understand why some sunscreens would list only so-called mineral components like zinc oxide as their only active ingredient and if they were as effective as the other sunscreens.
00:38And what we found from that was that at least some of the ones that we looked at that contain zinc oxide as the active ingredient also actually include many of the other components that you find in all the common sunscreens.
00:49So they're great sunscreens, but possibly not just because they have zinc oxide in them.
00:54Yeah, so some of these brands have said that these chemicals weren't hidden and that they were included in the formula, but they weren't designed to be sort of the main active ingredients.
01:07How is it that chemicals can be included in a product, but not necessarily listed as such on the label?
01:14Yeah, so on the label of the bottle, they only list what they say is the active ingredient, which is the one that the TGA would also consider to be the active ingredient of that sunscreen.
01:23But you can have other components in there that are having similar sorts of roles that you would find for traditional chemical sunscreens, except if they have a slightly different chemical structure, then they're no longer listed as being active ingredients.
01:39So they will claim to have other roles, for example, to make the sunscreen easier to spread on your skin or to make it form a nice film to protect you properly, rather than it having a role as a sunscreen itself.
01:52But it's clear that those other components absorb UV in a very similar way to the known sunscreen components.
01:58So do the regulations and the laws need to change here, do you think, about sunscreen packaging?
02:03I don't think so.
02:05It would be great if sunscreen companies could be honest with their customers and rather than trying to present something as though it was more natural or somehow safer,
02:15just be honest and say that sunscreens are really high-tech products that are fantastic for protecting you against the harmful UV rays in the sun.
02:24And that the way that that works is by absorption of UV light by chemical additives or chemical components, some of which would be zinc oxide, but also the sort of thing you find in every other type of common sunscreen.
02:38And so sort of mineral or not, as you say, sunscreen is still pretty important.
02:43And this research hasn't found that these products are any less effective than they're advertised to be, though, have you?
02:49No, certainly not.
02:50They're all great sunscreens.
02:53And they're all, at least all the ones that we test, under our conditions, they well exceed the SPF factors that they report.
03:00So they're great sunscreens.
03:02But at least in some cases, part of that protection is not from the listed active ingredients, but from other components that have been added.
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