5568 - Sunscreen

Interesting article from the Atlantic Magazine about sunscreen in the US vs the rest of the world. I'll put the link at the bottom but I'm posting the last half of the article that has the most technical info. 

*****

A sunscreen that has an unpleasant texture or turns your skin a strange color might be tolerable for a one-off excursion to the beach or an afternoon in the cheap seats at a baseball game, but it wouldn’t exactly encourage thorough and repeated applications of a sunscreen, which is necessary no matter which product you use. For everyday use, which is widely recommended by dermatologists, the obstacles are even harder to clear, from a formulation standpoint: Oily products don’t play nice with makeup, while chalky products look wild on pretty much everyone, especially people with darker skin tones. Adam Friedman, a dermatologist at George Washington University, told me such concerns are a huge obstacle for his patients. “You can have the best filter in the world,” he said. “If the vehicle in which that ingredient resides is visibly unacceptable or physically unacceptable in terms of application, it doesn’t matter.”

For many people, frustration with sunscreen means they don’t wear it as much as they should. For others, it means looking beyond the country’s shores for better products. In Europe, Australia, and much of Asia, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics or health-bolstering goods, with simpler efficacy and safety standards than those in the U.S. In those markets, several dozen active ingredients are available for use in sunscreens, including some developed in the past decade that have intriguing properties. The allure of these new technologies has drawn Americans to scour the internet for supply lines that skirt FDA notice, which often means buying sunscreen through third-party sellers on Amazon. (The booming popularity of Korean beauty products in the U.S. has only added to this fervor.) A few international sunscreen products have recently become cult favorites among U.S. beauty fiends, including one that feels like a skin-care product and is marketed as a “watery essence” by Bioré, a Japanese company known to Americans mostly for producing the little paper strips that rip the gunk out of your pores.

Bioré markets some of its products in the U.S., but its ultra-popular facial sunscreen contains bemotrizinol, a chemical filter that’s popular overseas but has not yet been approved in the U.S. The substance is on a short list of those that Dobos told me have the strongest case for FDA approval—it’s widely used around the world and very effective at absorbing UV rays. Another ingredient at the top of her list is bisoctrizole, a favorite in Europe, which she said degrades more slowly in sunlight, is less readily absorbed by the wearer’s skin, and helps stabilize other UV filters when mixed with them, potentially improving their efficacy. Wearers don’t need to reapply it as often in order to remain protected, and they may not worry as much about the putative risks of carrying chemical filters in their bloodstream. (None of the experts I spoke with said there is any demonstrated danger from using standard products as directed. You probably shouldn’t eat your sunscreen, though.)

Dobos emphasized to me that she thinks the FDA’s strict regulation of sunscreen products is generally beneficial to the American public, but that the agency’s slow progress on new ingredients doesn’t match the urgency of skin cancer’s threat to public health. In formal statements and position papers, doctors and cancer-prevention advocates express considerable interest in bringing new sunscreen ingredients to the American market, but not a lot of optimism that any will be available soon. The FDA hasn’t added a new active ingredient to its sunscreen monograph—the document that details what is legally allowed in products marketed in the U.S.—in decades. The process for doing this is so onerous that L’Oreal, a French company, chose to go through a separate authorization process to get one of its sunscreen ingredients onto the consumer market in 2006—which meant that only a few specific beauty products containing that ingredient could be marketed legally.

In 2014, Congress passed a law attempting to speed access to sunscreen ingredients that have been in wide use in other countries for years, but it hasn’t really worked. “The FDA was supposed to be fast-tracking these ingredients for approval because we have the safety data and safe history of usage from the European Union,” Dobos said. “But it seems to continually be stalled.” According to Courtney Rhodes, a spokesperson for the FDA, manufacturers have submitted eight new active ingredients for consideration. The agency has asked them to provide additional data in support of those applications, but none of them has yet satisfied the agency’s requirements.

“In the medical community, there is a significant frustration about the lack of availability of some of the sunscreen active ingredients,” Henry Lim, a dermatologist at Henry Ford Health, in Michigan, told me. The more filters are available to formulators, the more they can be mixed and matched in new ways, which stands to improve not just the efficacy of the final product, but how it feels and looks on your skin, and how easy it is to apply. On a very real level, making sunscreen less onerous to use can make it more effective. “The best sunscreen is going to be the one you’re going to use often and according to the directions,” Dobos said. Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the United States, and by one estimate, one in five Americans will develop it in their lifetime.

For many dermatologists, these lengthy regulatory battles and widespread issues with regular usage also underline a common recommendation that tends to go unheard by patients: Sunscreen is great, and sunscreen from Europe, Australia, and Asia may be better, but even the best, most cutting-edge SPF lotion is just one part of keeping your skin healthy. Floppy hats, big beach umbrellas, or loose, high-coverage clothing might not be your ideal beach look while you’re young, but if you can mostly cover-up and stick to the shade, your elderly self will thank you.

*****

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/07/us-sunscreen-ingredients-outdated-technology-better-eu-asia/661433/