This article never actually says which chemicals are being used in these sunscreens that are supposedly better/safer, but basically there are only two groups of effective active ingredients for sunscreen: zinc or titanium oxide (minerals) or benzene/petroleum derivatives. The problem with the latter is they absorb through the skin and are carcinogenic, although the research shows they're better than mineral-based sunscreen at blocking UV across a wider spectrum and therefore the offset in skin cancer rate is more than the cancer risk from absorption. Meanwhile good old zinc oxide has basically no downsides except that it doesn't look pretty and you have to reapply it often if you're swimming or sweating, and if you reapply often enough it's nearly as effective as benzene-based sunscreens.
The "better" EU sunscreens and also those in Korean/Japanese products, in my experience are using benzene derived chemicals. I'll stick to zinc oxide, thanks.
Wrong there are plenty of other ingredients. In fact one of those ingredients that is permitted in EU and not US is ecamsule. It is quite nice, it absorbs the UV photons by switching confirmation (different isomere) rather than being oxidised into ROS/free radicals as many other ingredients do.
Ecamsule is interesting but unfortunately only blocks a very narrow wavelength of UVA, which means it has to be mixed with other chemicals which are usually the benzene derivatives I mention. It's also water-soluble so very difficult to make it waterproof.
Materials science is hard, and it's even harder when it comes to things we put in and on our bodies, which is why we shouldn't sensationalize the benefits of new chemicals without acknowledging their downsides, especially when we have found something that works exceptionally well, is cheap, and is merely cosmetically challenging (zinc oxide).
Yes, titanium and aluminum were commonly used in skincare products like sunscreen and deodorant and even in toothpaste (and still are in the US), but should be avoided. That's part of why I use zinc oxide and not titanium oxide. Zinc oxide is not a carcinogen.
If sunscreen is supposed to provide specific health benefits, namely to reduce cancer risk, then it is a drug, not a cosmetic. Regulations should ensure it provides the intended effect without undue harm. Cosmetics are given more leeway because they are, in principle, neutral from a medical perspective. Why would you want to treat a cancer related product like that? Saving upfront time and money, at the risk of having to spend a lot more time and money later in healthcare, is not a good reason. If anything, we might head the opposite direction. Some people think we should start regulating dietary supplements as drugs rather than food.
FDA does regulate cosmetics components, and FTC regulates what claims they can make. It’s hard to make a binary decision that one thing is a drug and something else isn’t. You can appreciate there is a spectrum of side effects with moisturizer and sunblock on one end, supplements in the middle, and chemotherapy drugs on the other end.
Personally, I think that Americans simply don’t treat skin cancer as seriously as they should, and so the market has not provided more choices.
Sure, but that doesn’t excuse the FDA from slow-rolling/blocking new ingredients that should be better. As noted in the article, the sunscreens available here would not pass muster in the EU despite supposedly less stringent rules.
I've no opinion whatsoever on the topic, but why can't economists refrain from writing opinion pieces in newspaper about topics they have no qualification on?
I'm sure there's enough dermatologists and pharmaceutical engineers to give their informed opinion on such a topic, instead of having economists speaking as everythingologists on every damn subject…
(I know why they do that, the author is merely a polical activist, but I wish editors would just close the door to such pieces).
I'd say dermatology, nutrition/dietetics, and phytopathology are 3 of the worst fields in this regard. I don't think we're fully over the sugar lobby's stranglehold on relevant science and I think the glyphosate lobby's hold is even stronger than that was. How many times are we gonna go through these crises and not reform the way we do and fund science?
Poking around on Google, the scientific consensus seems to be that the EU or Asian sunscreens are in fact better. I haven’t found anything to the contrary.
Maybe more relevant is "Engineer syndrome" — the tendency of technically minded individuals to assume that their expertise in one area makes them an authority on everything
I think the problem overall is just that we live in a society that conditions us to get validation from the size of our paychecks. Software engineers get a fat paycheck and think "well I must be really smart. Why else would society compensate me like this?". I'm sure it's a problem in all sorts of highly-paid fields. I'm always shocked by how many physicians I see write massively ambitious, terribly researched generalizations (see Jared Diamond and the experts in relevant fields that will spend the rest of their lives dispelling myths he spread)
From what I read in the article, American sunscreen has more stringent regulation because it is qualified as drugs, which has higher standards, thus making American sunscreen safer (but less efficient).
Yeah, the article is contradiction with itself. US has higher standards, restricting what can be sold but then also states, "In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection."
Sunscreen can be unsafe in that the ingredients poison you. Or it can be unsafe in that it fails to screen the sun's harmful UV. More ingredients to choose from means that it can be safer at screening UV. But...
My personal hot take is that we should all be using zinc (or titanium) oxide sunscreen which AFAICT maxes out both effectiveness and chemical safety. (And is the best for the fish?) Interestingly, these are the only ingredients that the FDA currently deems both safe and effective.
My wife is black and has sensitive skin. She once tried zinc oxide sunscreen. If one wants to be protected from the sun while cosplaying as purple monster, it's a great choice.
This truly is the biggest drawbacks. It's almost impossible to make zinc sunscreen see-through. One technique is to micronize the zinc but this comes with its own set of risks including skin penetration and environmental risks that micronized zinc can pose to aquatic life.
I think the only solution is to embrace it. There isn't really a 100% safe sunscreen that is also invisible
Sunscreens that use zinc/titanium dioxide as active ingredients are often so unpleasant to use that people don't apply enough of them or refuse to use them. The "nicer" sunscreens that use these ingredients often sneak in SPF boosters which are actually derivatives of other chemical sunscreens but are treated differently on the ingredients label, pretty much cheating the system.
> The "nicer" sunscreens that use these ingredients often sneak in SPF boosters which are actually derivatives of other chemical sunscreens but are treated differently on the ingredients label, pretty much cheating the system.
Interesting, thank you for pointing this out. I had a little trouble understanding what the link was saying at first, but it seems to (correctly) state that many "mineral" sunscreens contain active chemical ingredients like butyloctyl salicylate. (And they're sometimes labeled as non-active ingredients?)
> A peer-approval system would work both ways. Europe would also take into account FDA decisions
This doesn't seem like a given at all. Just because the FDA accepts EMA approvals wouldn't mean the EMA would accept FDA ones and as a European, I wouldn't want it to.
3 years ago I was in pharma in Europe. Back then (a political lifetime ago), the FDA had an excellent reputation and was considered a kind of gold standard.
Get your new drug approved by the FDA, and ~50+ countries would follow more or less on autopilot.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because as far as I know, they really _were_ that good.
The FDA’s big claim to fame is not approving thalidomide when European regulators did, preventing a bunch of birth defects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
The modern FDA's big claim to fame is having the previous head of it forced out, then nearly immediately approving controversial fruit-flavored vape products at the behest of a POTUS who both owns stock in Altria/Philip Morris and receives millions in Super PAC money from the tobacco industry.
Past performance is perhaps not indicative of future results.
Theoretically speaking, if the standards are broadly aligned, there is something to be said about reducing duplicative efforts to regulate. The EMA has partnerships with other regulatory agencies already. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/partners-networks/international...
Like, you don't need two agencies to test that the side effect of a medicine is nausea.
Peer approval schemes are usually implemented as trade efficiency measures. A one sided peer approval would make it easier to import, while not making it easier to export, causing a delta trade deficit.
This isn't about trade efficiency though, it's about bypassing an inefficient bureaucracy by allowing for approval by a more efficient one as an option.
We have no intention of dropping our standards to US ones, but they are welcome to follow our lead. (Or don't! It's up to you, just don't make it our problem!)
Why is a trade deficit something to worry about? After all, my local grocery store buys nothing from me, but we both benefit from the exchange of goods and currency.
Did anyone feel that food in Europe and Japan are fresher and more safe? Many of my friends anecdotally felt that they felt better after eating in Japan or Europe than in the US.
Seems like the free market does make this problem go away. This is simply one of the (few) instances where there is a freer market in the EU that in the US
>In the European Union, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics, which means greater flexibility in approving active ingredients. In the U.S., sunscreens are regulated as drugs, which means getting new ingredients approved is an expensive and time-consuming process. Because they’re treated as cosmetics, European-made sunscreens can draw on a wider variety of ingredients that protect better and are also less oily, less chalky and last longer.
You should take this as an opportunity to reflect on the amount of lives lost as a result of the regulations in place for drugs, in both the EU and US.
If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.
calling the EU a free market that makes problems go away to draft macro economic conclusions from sunscreens is a particularly shallow analysis
Free Market advocates already did that move after walking in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, at times they were more qualified in partisan politics than proficient in Chinese.
We had been hearing their absolute "facts" and only alternative theory for a full century afterwards
I guess it's better to quickly correct that Europe isn't a lawless free market and a huge corpus of regulations still exists, even if the specific problem to approve new sunscreens is a different process in here
regulation and economy can be discussed, but EU isn't an example of free market. Sunscreens are still heavily regulated like everything else. FDA and all their processes aren't perfect, but they do a good job overall
More likely if the FDA was properly funded these things could get reviewed more often and this wouldn't be an issue. Not updating allowed ingredients in over 20 years doesn't point towards a lack of flexibility, its debilitation.
If it's straightforward to approve new cosmetics, REACH, Cosmetic Products Regulation 1223/2009 updated no latter than this year in regulation 2026/78, ISO 22716 and whatnot still apply
You can find lists of ingredients banned in cosmetics in the EU, or across EVERY industry in general
Perfume manufacturers are the only ones who get away with virtually everything as they don't have to declare their ingredients (but "perfumes" are also an ingredient in a bunch of cosmetics, so here is the loophole as Europe always has loopholes)
> Not at all. In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.
Are they less safe, or _may_ they be less safe? The distinction is important, and I'm wary of overexcited editors "upgrading" titles for clicks.
(This is a comment on the veracity of the title claim only - I'm British, I have no skin in this game)
> I have no skin in this game
You literally have if you use sunscreen. ;)
He just said he’s British
2 replies →
Britain conforms with EU regulations on sunscreen, as with almost everything else.
Maybe one day they will join the union
This article never actually says which chemicals are being used in these sunscreens that are supposedly better/safer, but basically there are only two groups of effective active ingredients for sunscreen: zinc or titanium oxide (minerals) or benzene/petroleum derivatives. The problem with the latter is they absorb through the skin and are carcinogenic, although the research shows they're better than mineral-based sunscreen at blocking UV across a wider spectrum and therefore the offset in skin cancer rate is more than the cancer risk from absorption. Meanwhile good old zinc oxide has basically no downsides except that it doesn't look pretty and you have to reapply it often if you're swimming or sweating, and if you reapply often enough it's nearly as effective as benzene-based sunscreens.
The "better" EU sunscreens and also those in Korean/Japanese products, in my experience are using benzene derived chemicals. I'll stick to zinc oxide, thanks.
Wrong there are plenty of other ingredients. In fact one of those ingredients that is permitted in EU and not US is ecamsule. It is quite nice, it absorbs the UV photons by switching confirmation (different isomere) rather than being oxidised into ROS/free radicals as many other ingredients do.
Ecamsule is interesting but unfortunately only blocks a very narrow wavelength of UVA, which means it has to be mixed with other chemicals which are usually the benzene derivatives I mention. It's also water-soluble so very difficult to make it waterproof.
Materials science is hard, and it's even harder when it comes to things we put in and on our bodies, which is why we shouldn't sensationalize the benefits of new chemicals without acknowledging their downsides, especially when we have found something that works exceptionally well, is cheap, and is merely cosmetically challenging (zinc oxide).
> good old zinc oxide has basically no downsides except that it doesn't look pretty
Tinted sunscreens solve this problem.
Btw titanium dioxide is now a suspected carcinogenic. It is illegal in food in the EU now.
Yes, titanium and aluminum were commonly used in skincare products like sunscreen and deodorant and even in toothpaste (and still are in the US), but should be avoided. That's part of why I use zinc oxide and not titanium oxide. Zinc oxide is not a carcinogen.
I hope you didn't type that comment using a cell phone, because IARC also suspects that to be carcinogenic.
Didn't the FDA clear new ingredients this week? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/well/fda-sunscreen-bemotr...
OP's article is from 2024, according to the date on it
I think a lot of us HN-types are people who like to post riddles like this instead of news about what actually happened.
Does that make them safer?
[dead]
If sunscreen is supposed to provide specific health benefits, namely to reduce cancer risk, then it is a drug, not a cosmetic. Regulations should ensure it provides the intended effect without undue harm. Cosmetics are given more leeway because they are, in principle, neutral from a medical perspective. Why would you want to treat a cancer related product like that? Saving upfront time and money, at the risk of having to spend a lot more time and money later in healthcare, is not a good reason. If anything, we might head the opposite direction. Some people think we should start regulating dietary supplements as drugs rather than food.
FDA does regulate cosmetics components, and FTC regulates what claims they can make. It’s hard to make a binary decision that one thing is a drug and something else isn’t. You can appreciate there is a spectrum of side effects with moisturizer and sunblock on one end, supplements in the middle, and chemotherapy drugs on the other end.
Personally, I think that Americans simply don’t treat skin cancer as seriously as they should, and so the market has not provided more choices.
Sure, but that doesn’t excuse the FDA from slow-rolling/blocking new ingredients that should be better. As noted in the article, the sunscreens available here would not pass muster in the EU despite supposedly less stringent rules.
I've no opinion whatsoever on the topic, but why can't economists refrain from writing opinion pieces in newspaper about topics they have no qualification on?
I'm sure there's enough dermatologists and pharmaceutical engineers to give their informed opinion on such a topic, instead of having economists speaking as everythingologists on every damn subject…
(I know why they do that, the author is merely a polical activist, but I wish editors would just close the door to such pieces).
Frankly, the field of dermatology is so captured by corporations that my confidence is hardly raised when I see a degree in that field.
Is there a term for regulatory capture but for academia? Like "academic capture"?
I'd say dermatology, nutrition/dietetics, and phytopathology are 3 of the worst fields in this regard. I don't think we're fully over the sugar lobby's stranglehold on relevant science and I think the glyphosate lobby's hold is even stronger than that was. How many times are we gonna go through these crises and not reform the way we do and fund science?
Poking around on Google, the scientific consensus seems to be that the EU or Asian sunscreens are in fact better. I haven’t found anything to the contrary.
Sidenote: this phenomenon is known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
Maybe more relevant is "Engineer syndrome" — the tendency of technically minded individuals to assume that their expertise in one area makes them an authority on everything
See also Nobel Disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
I think the problem overall is just that we live in a society that conditions us to get validation from the size of our paychecks. Software engineers get a fat paycheck and think "well I must be really smart. Why else would society compensate me like this?". I'm sure it's a problem in all sorts of highly-paid fields. I'm always shocked by how many physicians I see write massively ambitious, terribly researched generalizations (see Jared Diamond and the experts in relevant fields that will spend the rest of their lives dispelling myths he spread)
(2024)
More recently:
FDA Expands Sunscreen Options for the First Time in 20 Years to Add Bemotrizinol
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48466007)
From what I read in the article, American sunscreen has more stringent regulation because it is qualified as drugs, which has higher standards, thus making American sunscreen safer (but less efficient).
Yeah, the article is contradiction with itself. US has higher standards, restricting what can be sold but then also states, "In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection."
So which is it?
Both? I mean both can be true.
European sunscreens are less regulated than American sunscreens and are thus safer because they can draw from a wider array of ingredients.
American food is less regulated than European food and is thus less safe because it can draw from a wider array of ingredients.
Wait.
Sunscreen can be unsafe in that the ingredients poison you. Or it can be unsafe in that it fails to screen the sun's harmful UV. More ingredients to choose from means that it can be safer at screening UV. But...
Imagine if car regulations specified what can be in a car.
"You want seatbelts, airbags, ABS? Bureaucracy says not allowed! There's a lengthy review process!"
The correct statement in the US would be: You want seatbelts, airbags, ABS? You have to pay a $1000 monthly fee.
Sorry, I couldn't resist
The FDA did (3 days ago!) finally approve a new ingredient: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-expa...
My personal hot take is that we should all be using zinc (or titanium) oxide sunscreen which AFAICT maxes out both effectiveness and chemical safety. (And is the best for the fish?) Interestingly, these are the only ingredients that the FDA currently deems both safe and effective.
My wife is black and has sensitive skin. She once tried zinc oxide sunscreen. If one wants to be protected from the sun while cosplaying as purple monster, it's a great choice.
This truly is the biggest drawbacks. It's almost impossible to make zinc sunscreen see-through. One technique is to micronize the zinc but this comes with its own set of risks including skin penetration and environmental risks that micronized zinc can pose to aquatic life.
I think the only solution is to embrace it. There isn't really a 100% safe sunscreen that is also invisible
I'm light-skin and look like a ghost with Blue Lizard. I can't imagine how ridiculous it must look on dark skin.
Sunscreens that use zinc/titanium dioxide as active ingredients are often so unpleasant to use that people don't apply enough of them or refuse to use them. The "nicer" sunscreens that use these ingredients often sneak in SPF boosters which are actually derivatives of other chemical sunscreens but are treated differently on the ingredients label, pretty much cheating the system.
SPF boosters: https://labmuffin.com/100-mineral-sunscreens-using-unregulat...
The coral-safe sunscreen claims don't have a lot of evidence behind them:
https://labmuffin.com/is-your-sunscreen-killing-coral-the-sc...
> The "nicer" sunscreens that use these ingredients often sneak in SPF boosters which are actually derivatives of other chemical sunscreens but are treated differently on the ingredients label, pretty much cheating the system.
Interesting, thank you for pointing this out. I had a little trouble understanding what the link was saying at first, but it seems to (correctly) state that many "mineral" sunscreens contain active chemical ingredients like butyloctyl salicylate. (And they're sometimes labeled as non-active ingredients?)
the EWG's sunscreen reviews are quite in depth fwiw. They even assess the "data availability" of each ingredient
https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/best-sunscreens/best-beach-spo...
2 replies →
Titanium dioxide is now an IARC 2B suspected carcinogen.
IARC is not a regulatory body, and its categories do not address disease risk.
Maybe FDA got this right. I bet you dollars to donuts that putting TiO2 on your skin reduces the risk of cancer.
1 reply →
> A peer-approval system would work both ways. Europe would also take into account FDA decisions
This doesn't seem like a given at all. Just because the FDA accepts EMA approvals wouldn't mean the EMA would accept FDA ones and as a European, I wouldn't want it to.
I have a lot more trust in the EMA than the FDA.
3 years ago I was in pharma in Europe. Back then (a political lifetime ago), the FDA had an excellent reputation and was considered a kind of gold standard.
Get your new drug approved by the FDA, and ~50+ countries would follow more or less on autopilot.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because as far as I know, they really _were_ that good.
The FDA’s big claim to fame is not approving thalidomide when European regulators did, preventing a bunch of birth defects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
The modern FDA's big claim to fame is having the previous head of it forced out, then nearly immediately approving controversial fruit-flavored vape products at the behest of a POTUS who both owns stock in Altria/Philip Morris and receives millions in Super PAC money from the tobacco industry.
Past performance is perhaps not indicative of future results.
This was also an entire lifetime ago.
Theoretically speaking, if the standards are broadly aligned, there is something to be said about reducing duplicative efforts to regulate. The EMA has partnerships with other regulatory agencies already. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/partners-networks/international...
Like, you don't need two agencies to test that the side effect of a medicine is nausea.
Peer approval schemes are usually implemented as trade efficiency measures. A one sided peer approval would make it easier to import, while not making it easier to export, causing a delta trade deficit.
That how you end up with chlorinated chicken you'd never knowingly eat.
Obviously any authority that takes its job seriously makes decisions based on facts and not blind trust.
This isn't about trade efficiency though, it's about bypassing an inefficient bureaucracy by allowing for approval by a more efficient one as an option.
We have no intention of dropping our standards to US ones, but they are welcome to follow our lead. (Or don't! It's up to you, just don't make it our problem!)
That's a problem for the country with insufficient approval schemes to deal with, especially if they're also doing more work out of spite.
For a country which has a sufficient approval scheme, they lose little by choosing not to trusting an insufficient approval scheme.
Why is a trade deficit something to worry about? After all, my local grocery store buys nothing from me, but we both benefit from the exchange of goods and currency.
1 reply →
Japanese ones are also much better. I like Anessa Milk, it also doesn't stain as bad as some others.
Did anyone feel that food in Europe and Japan are fresher and more safe? Many of my friends anecdotally felt that they felt better after eating in Japan or Europe than in the US.
Can't the free market just make this problem go away?
Seems like the free market does make this problem go away. This is simply one of the (few) instances where there is a freer market in the EU that in the US
>In the European Union, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics, which means greater flexibility in approving active ingredients. In the U.S., sunscreens are regulated as drugs, which means getting new ingredients approved is an expensive and time-consuming process. Because they’re treated as cosmetics, European-made sunscreens can draw on a wider variety of ingredients that protect better and are also less oily, less chalky and last longer.
You should take this as an opportunity to reflect on the amount of lives lost as a result of the regulations in place for drugs, in both the EU and US.
If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.
calling the EU a free market that makes problems go away to draft macro economic conclusions from sunscreens is a particularly shallow analysis
Free Market advocates already did that move after walking in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, at times they were more qualified in partisan politics than proficient in Chinese. We had been hearing their absolute "facts" and only alternative theory for a full century afterwards
I guess it's better to quickly correct that Europe isn't a lawless free market and a huge corpus of regulations still exists, even if the specific problem to approve new sunscreens is a different process in here
regulation and economy can be discussed, but EU isn't an example of free market. Sunscreens are still heavily regulated like everything else. FDA and all their processes aren't perfect, but they do a good job overall
1 reply →
The flipside of this is that companies put dangerous chemicals into food, cookware, etc. Not convinced things would be better on net.
12 replies →
More likely if the FDA was properly funded these things could get reviewed more often and this wouldn't be an issue. Not updating allowed ingredients in over 20 years doesn't point towards a lack of flexibility, its debilitation.
1 reply →
You seem to be unaware of the asymmetry of information and competence. This is why consumer protection exists.
What specific consumer protections are you referencing?
1 reply →
Existed*
If it's straightforward to approve new cosmetics, REACH, Cosmetic Products Regulation 1223/2009 updated no latter than this year in regulation 2026/78, ISO 22716 and whatnot still apply
You can find lists of ingredients banned in cosmetics in the EU, or across EVERY industry in general
Perfume manufacturers are the only ones who get away with virtually everything as they don't have to declare their ingredients (but "perfumes" are also an ingredient in a bunch of cosmetics, so here is the loophole as Europe always has loopholes)
Consider the potential for economic growth in private testing services. It's called job creation!
Oh yeah, the free market is great at burying problems so consumers remain in the dark.
It already has. That is why you are reading this right now.
It could, but everybody got an orange tan afterwards.
This has been true for a while. Sadly.
[dead]